TopGame Creators

Gabe Newell is the iconic head of Valve Software, a company he helped create after working on such forgettable titles as Microsoft Bob as well as more well-known projects like early versions of Windows for the Redmond giant. He's been the poster child for first-game success (the first Half-Life, itself based on a heavily modified version of the original Quake's engine), for digital distribution (Valve's own Steam service), for in-house tech and licensing of that tech to other developers (the Source Engine), for episodic releases (Half-Life: Episodes One and Two) and for cultivation of community-born projects turned retail successes (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Gunman Chronicles, Portal, Left 4 Dead). About the only thing Newell isn't known for is resting, apparently.

That kind of tirelessness has paid off, however; Valve is now arguably the single most recognizable and reliable purveyor of not only in-house game design, but an over-arching umbrella of external recruiting and collaboration. Fan-made mods have become honest-to-goodness retail products (or at the very least have been sold on Steam), and some smaller developers have been brought into Valve itself to give everything a proper spit polish.

It's almost impossible to gauge the kind of impact that Newell's company has had on everything from gameplay (Half-Life and its sequel still do an amazing job blending basic puzzles with tight combat and an all-encompassing ambience) to technology to independence. With Steam literally becoming the company pulling itself up by the bootstraps and creating their own publishing chain, they're now beholden to no one and keenly aware of where PC gaming is heading, all due in no small part to Newell's vision that first catapulted Valve into the limelight just over a decade ago.

In the heyday of arcade fighters, there were two kinds of people: those who played Street Fighter and those who played Mortal Kombat. If you considered yourself the latter, then you have Ed Boon to thank for it.

It all started when Midway decided to capitalize on the success of eventual rival Capcom and its blockbuster slugger, Street Fighter II, by creating a unique fighting game of its own. John Tobias and Ed Boon were tapped as the men who could pull it off -- with Tobias handling much of the design and Boon wielding his programmer's wand to create the overnight success, Mortal Kombat.

The explanation behind the MK sensation? It was an entirely different experience from Street Fighter altogether. Sporting a dissimilar combat engine, block button and the innovative "Fatality" match-enders, the violent puncher created or seriously influenced many gaming trends that still stand today -- not just in the genre, but the industry as a whole. In fact, it was the heavily-criticized emphasis on blood and gore that spawned the first real debate on violence in videogames that also led to the eventual creation of a rating system to help inform parents about which games may be suitable for their kids. At its height, Mortal Kombat was such a popular and influential fighter that even Midway itself started ripping its own game off, joining the already-sizeable number of clones that tried to capitalize on the MK formula (War Gods anyone?).

Though John Tobias left the Midway team in 2000, Boon has continued to create and oversee each new Mortal Kombat project. He has reinvented the series from its simplistic roots into a deep, well-rounded fighter that's seen upgrades that include everything from the use of weapons and fully-realized quest modes to online head-to-head match-ups and fighters with dynamically-switching fighting styles -- and audiences continue to eat it up.

"When [a game] comes together well, there is very little that is more gratifying," Boon told Edge Magazine in 2006. "It makes all the hard work worth it."

Toru Iwatani is a god among men in the gaming industry. It was Iwatani-sama's innovation that helped videogames achieve their current level of popularity... and it was all because of Shakeys Pizza (and girls). That's right, folks -- Toru Iwatani is the creative genius behind the phenomenon known as Pac-Man.

And we have a pizza pie to thank for it.

In 1977, a young Iwatani began as a programmer for a computer software company called Namco, and designed the 1978 and 79 arcade releases Gee Bee, Bomb Bee, and Cutie-Q. After working on these three titles, Iwatani wished to create a game that would target women and couples; his goal was for game centers to shed their somewhat sinister image for a lighter atmosphere, and he believed that the key to doing that was to get girls to come in.

Iwatani's eureka moment came when he removed a slice of pizza from a pie, creating the visual inspiration for his next big thing. It was in this moment that, according to Iwatani, Pac-Man was officially born. Now that he had the look, he needed that special something to attract his target audience. After listening to girls talk to one another, Iwatani determined that food and eating would be the way to get the fairer sex interested in arcade games.

In 1980, Pac-Man (renamed from "Puck Man" for fear that the arcade cabinet would be defaced by smart-ass kids) was released in the US under Midway, and the face of gaming was irrevocably altered.

On the technical side of things, Pac-Man's AI was revolutionary; the ghosts did not move at random -- instead, they moved around the maps in four distinct behavioral patterns. However, the real brilliance behind Pac-Man was its unprecedented sense of life. The act of eating and the terrified expressions of the ghosts as they fled a ravenous yellow disc tapped into gamers' affinity for living things.

Life after Pac-Man saw Iwatani work his way up within Namco's ranks, creating games such as Libble Rabble and eventually becoming the company's leading producer on arcade titles like Time Crisis and Ridge Racer. In April of 2005, he began teaching Character Design Studies at the Osaka University of Arts as a visiting professor. In early 2007, after working on Pac-Man: Championship Edition, Iwatani left Namco and became a full-time professor at Tokyo Polytechnic University, saying, "I thought it more important to pass on the know-how that I've accumulated over the last 30 years to the next generation."

Even if his name isn't instantly recognizable, his work is unforgettable. Yoji Shinkawa, a Konami illustrator since 1994, is responsible for some of the most indelible character designs this side of the PlayStation era, and while his early work on Konami's Policenauts won't have had much Western impact, Shinkawa's pairing with director Hideo Kojima has birthed one of the most beloved franchises of our time.

Metal Gear Solid is among Japan's few enduring relevancies, much credit due to Shinkawa's striking artistic influence and character design. Few who've played the first Metal Gear Solid will forget the tortured, pitiful figure of Psycho Mantis whose gripping personality is as evident in his visual design as in the lauded scripting. The maturity evident in Metal Gear Solid's visual design demonstrates the artistic chops of Yoji Shinkawa, his modern-classical styling a stark contrast—and great influence—against the typically youth-targeted art of videogames past and present. Even the videogames with genuine artistic merit often resorted to super-deformed, childish game characters before Metal Gear Solid proved that highly stylized, mature art could impact the mainstream market.

Since the first Metal Gear Solid over a decade ago, Yoji Shinkawa has continued his influence on Kojima's creations. The cult favorite Zone of the Enders franchise owes its impressive mechanical design to Shinkawa, whose early school drawings reportedly transferred to the games quite nearly unchanged. And while Hideo Kojima threatens to abandon the Metal Gear series in pursuit of new efforts more Western in scope, we anticipate that Shinkawa's artistic brilliance will play a role in not only influencing the game's artistic direction but in also creating the celebrated game characters of tomorrow.

Koichi Ishii has produced and directed numerous big-name games for Square Enix, including Final Fantasy I through III and SaGa Frontier. His biggest claim to fame, though, is that he is also the man responsible for creating Chocobos and Moogles.

What we remember Ishii most for, however, is the construction of the Mana series. Back in 1987, Square Enix cancelled the original Seiken Densetsu before it ever made it past the planning stages. But Ishii revived the title in the early '90s, originally calling it Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden and designing it as a supplement to the bigger series. It was one of the best RPGs available for the Game Boy, which allowed the series to really hit its stride with Secret of Mana on the SNES -- successfully distancing itself from Final Fantasy to stand alone as a major series.

Ishii worked hard to make Mana unique by creating a real-time battle system at a time when being turn-based was the modus operandi. Fans and critics felt that it played a lot like a deeper Zelda game with a faster pace since players switched between battle screens and overworld maps every dozen steps or so. It was a gorgeous accomplishment during the 16-bit era, utilizing things like the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 to create pseudo 3D maps, which is something few games on the platform ever did without resulting to gimmicks.

Ishii has directed every game in the Mana series, and has evolved it into a string of multiplayer dungeon crawlers and tactical RPGs. Though the later games haven’t quite had the notoriety of the original, Ishii's dedication to his franchise has helped push JRPGs beyond the old idea that only one basic formula and presentation can be successful.

When it comes to platforming on the Sony consoles, Naughty Dog has always been a front runner, and Jason Rubin has been behind it all. Rubin, along with his friend Andy Gavin, started Naughty Dog when they were 15 years-old developing games in their basement.

In the mid-'90s, Rubin and Gavin got their big break with Crash Bandicoot. The 3D platformer was a big hit and became a flagship title for the original PlayStation. Crash himself was the unofficial mascot for the system and a benchmark was set for other developers. Naughty Dog continued the tradition with three more Crash games over the next several years and the third title in the series, Crash: Warped, became the only foreign-made game to sell over a million copies in Japan.

In 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment of America bought Naughty Dog and its next project, Jak and Daxter. A PlayStation 2 exclusive, Jake was a big success, pushing the boundaries of the PS2's technology. Naughty Dog, with Rubin at the helm, was credited with revitalizing the platformer genre and once again set a benchmark for other developers. The early 2000s saw a surge of high quality platforming titles, and Jak and Daxter became mascots that were just as recognizable as Crash years earlier.

Over the generations, Rubin has been an outspoken supporter of developer rights and has encouraged them to speak out if they're treated unfairly to demand what they think is deserved. In 2004 Rubin left Naughty Dog to pursue other endeavors, but his influence is still seen in the games made since.

There can be no greater honor in any field than to be recognized for doing something first, for painting the way for generations to come. Allan Alcorn has that honor, and though most may not recall the name as readily as a John Carmack or Shigeru Miyamoto, Alcorn did something before anyone else: he created the modern videogame (though certainly not the original video game). More specifically, he created Pong. Yeah, thatPong.

The idea -- which sprung out of just trying to test reflexes while enjoying his position as Atari's second employee in 1972 -- clearly resonated with just about everyone, bridging the gap between more male-dominated forms of coin-op entertainment like pinball machines and offering simple, universal, accessible appeal long before Nintendo would distill those ideas down into the Wii. When Atari took what was formerly an arcade cabinet-driven concept and put it in the hands of home players, the home console was born.

Interestingly enough, despite effectively helping Atari create the console market single-handedly, he left in 1981 -- long before the eventual bust that would tarnish the Atari name and give the aforementioned Nintendo its shot at effectively saving videogames from the crash of 1984. Alcorn eventually joined Apple, helping to nurture the then-emerging MPEG compression codec and QuickTime before forming his own company, Silicon Gaming, then branching out into the analysis of broadcast sources to divine what commercials are successful. Though he helped birth the concept of a home console, none of his future endeavors have quite risen to that level of success, but then that's the problem with being the first at something: you can only do it once.

The industry is filled with developers that got their start as kids, but the bulk of them broke into the limelight when programming techniques were almost archaic by today's standards. Somewhere between all the shader models and 7.1 positional audio of today and the 16 color visuals and PC speaker bleeps and bloops of yesteryear lies Chris Sawyer's big break: Transport Tycoon.

Though he'd honed his craft by porting Amiga games to the PC, it wasn't until he inked a deal with MicroProse to publish what was then dubbed I.T.S. (Interactive Transport Simulation) that things broke big -- or when the game was re-christened Transport Tycoon to piggyback off the success of Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon. It worked, and Transport Tycoon went on to sell more than enough copies to justify a follow-up, Roller Coaster Tycoon (which also had a name change from White Knuckle). A TC World Editor and Deluxe re-release, plus a RCT sequel and several expansion packs followed, and in 2004, the first proper follow-up to TC, Locomotion, was released.

Roller Coaster Tycoon almost single-handedly made Sawyer's career, with estimates that the game sold somewhere around nine million copies and that Sawyer was sitting atop a $30 million mountain of royalties. Apparently after auditing said royalties, he found Infrogrames/Atari owed him even more and he prepped a law suit.

He is currently flying a jet made of solid 24 carat gold around for kicks using only the power of his own ridiculous wealth to counteract gravity. That or he's continuing to make games. Either way, he's one of the most successful and enterprising developers on our list.

One of the most memorable names to emerge from the foundry of talent that was Origin Systems in the late '80s, Chris Roberts has also been one of the most active developers in the space simulation genre since he first created the Wing Commander series in 1990. It would prove to be something of Roberts' legacy, spawning a number of sequels that iterated on the space combat/sim genre with each successive game.

It also served as a vehicle for Roberts' directorial aspirations, though as the series went on that title had as much cinematographic relevance as it did programming. By the time Wing Commander IV had arrived, the series was incorporating large chunks of full-motion video and Roberts was directing scenes with Hollywood actors like Mark Hamil, Tom Wilson and Malcolm McDowell. This no doubt helped egg on aspirations at a full-time Hollywood career, which happened -- to an extent -- with the 1999 release of the Wing Commander flick starting Eddie Prinze, Jr. and Matthew Lillard.

Two years prior, Roberts departed Origin to form his own company, Digital Anvil, with help from Microsoft and chipmaker AMD. DA struck a multi-game publishing deal with (and was subsequently gobbled up by) Microsoft shortly thereafter. Impressively, Digital Anvil expanded beyond just games, supplying the visual effects work for the Wing Commander movie. Space served as a familiar backdrop for games like Starlancer and Freelancer, but by the time of their release, Roberts had begun moving away from games development and into feature film production and Digital Anvil was eventually dissolved. His latest company, Ascendant Pictures, is all but removed from games entirely, instead producing movies like The Punisher, Lord of War and Lucky Number Slevin.

If the only metric for success is selling millions of copies of your games, then Danielle Bunten Berry can't really be considered successful. If it's pushing videogames in an entirely new direction -- and multiple times at that -- then it's an entirely different matter altogether. This is precisely what Bunten did with games like M.U.L.E. (which offered up to four players simultaneously and challenged all of them to carefully manage resources while seeking to control both supply and demand, as players could work to corner the market if need be), The Seven Cities of Gold (which actually managed to be educational in addition to being entertaining) and Modem Wars (which offered a raft of now-standard RTS features but included the then-unheard-of idea of using a phone line or serial modem connection to link two players).

All All three of these titles were developed by Ozark Softscape, Bunten's development house, and were published by Electronic Arts in a deal inked back in the '80s, and though they weren't million-sellers (a concept that was all but impossible given the size of the industry back then anyway), they were certainly popular enough that even today they're cited as some of the pioneering examples of multiplayer or edutainment software.

Bunten passed away in 1997 after a battle with lung cancer, leaving behind a legacy of daring to explore the (then) far-off idea of people playing games together -- both in the same room and countries apart. Those ideals have become absolute mainstays now, which explain precisely why she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Spotlight Award and a Hall of Fame induction from the Computer Game Developers Association and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

Masahiro Sakurai is not just a talented developer, but also a bit of a character. Personable Personable and outspoken, Sakurai has stirred up a bit of controversy, and a lot of fans, for calling it like he sees it with Nintendo. As the creative force behind the Kirby games at the age of 19, Sakurai made a name for himself quicker than most do in a lifetime.

After four successful Kirby games Sakurai and HAL Laboratories started on an ambitious new project, Super Smash Bros. The Nintendo-themed brawler was intended as a special "thank you" for longtime Nintendo fans and wasn't expected to light the sales charts on fire, but did it ever -- pushing units like crazy to become one of the biggest Nintendo franchises of the last decade. Sakurai returned for the GameCube sequel as well, expanding the game with dozens of characters, more items and more levels, while establishing a proven formula for success (more than seven million copies were sold).

But in 2003, Sakurai created quote the buzz when he left HAL, saying that he felt stifled by the demand to constantly produce sequels. Eventually, Masahiro-san moved over to Q Entertainment for a brief stint to design the puzzle hit Meteos before being wooed back to direct the go-getting Wii-exclusive fighter, Super Smash Bros Brawl. During the game's development Sakurai updated the Smash Bros website every day, teasing gamers with new features, characters, and modes. Sakurai was notable in that he wanted the game to be as close to perfection as possible, and as a result, asked for numerous deadline extensions to tune it.

Sakurai's endgame proved that it was time well spent. We can only hope his next project is just as "perfect."

When CD-ROMs made landfall on PCs, it completely changed the games industry. Gone were the days of shipping games on multiple floppy discs, suddenly developers had an order of magnitude more space to play around with things. One of the first ways developers took advantage of all that extra storage was to pack the disc with full-motion video. Arguably the most memorable implementation of FMV-driven games was Trilobyte's The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, co-founded by Scottish impresario Graeme Devine.

Though the increase in space was massive, incorporating large portions of full-screen, full motion video could easily chew up all of it if not carefully managed. It was here that's Devine's ability to organize and stream the reams of data off the disc through his custom-built GROOVIE Engine paid off. It worked, and 7th Guest became the example of what all that storage could do to push the medium forward.

Sadly, Trilobyte didn't survive the 90s, though Devine most certainly did, going on to join id Software, first leading design on Quake III Arena and then helping port some of the company's biggest franchises to the diminutive Game Boy Color/Advance, a remarkable feat given the technological gap on some of the titles. After staying with id through Doom 3 (as well as offering support on third-party games that used id game engine), Devine joined Ensemble Studios and set to work on Age of Empires III before eventually moving to consoles by heading up Ensemble's effort to build a controller-driven RTS in Halo Wars.

Among the PC RPG crowd, few developers carry the kind of weight (not to mention tongue twisting monikers) of Feargus Urquhart. Then again, presiding over one of the most successful and consistent western RPG dev houses in the industry will do that for a guy, which is probably why Interplay's Black Isle Studios is still spoken of with the kind of hushed reverence hardly offered to other developers past or present.

Much of it was the perfect storm of timing, talent and momentum, a surge that started with the original Fallout and its sequel, then progressed -- in remarkably rapid-fire succession -- through games like Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate series (developed by BioWare under the guidance of Black Isle). It was Urquhart's leadership role (and an actual Black Isle in his native Scotland) that held the entire process together, melding in-house talent with what would become the tireless BioWare hit-making factory.

When Interplay began to hit the skids in the early part of the 21st century, Urquhart, already a bit leaner after some of the Fallout team left a few years earlier to form Troika Games, struck out and formed Obsidian Entertainment in 2003 with some other Black Isle alum. In an interesting flip from the Black Isle days where BioWare was the external developer, Obsidian's first game was actually a continuation of BioWare's own Knights of the Old Republic franchise, with Urquhart at the helm of day-to-day operations, a role he continues to this day.

Steve Barcia is a name many would associate with Retro Studios, makers of the Metroid Prime series. While he was president of the company for a while in the early 2000s, Barcia was a legend well before that. Fans of turn-based strategy can tell you that Master of Orion, and Master of Magic are two of the best tactical games ever made. Interestingly, Master of Orion started as "Star Lords," a fun and addictive, but hideous-looking experiment. Barcia showed it to Alan Emrich and Tom Hughes, who helped him make it more polished; reworking the game into what we know as Orion today. The game was epic in scale, allowing players to explore new planets, meet alien races, build space ships, and commit space genocides. Master of Magic was just as ambitious as players controlled a wizard attempting to rule the world. By building up cities and armies and managing resources, players could banish the other wizards and take control. Classic stuff! While real-time strategy games get a lot more press these days, it was the Master series that stand out as true innovators in turn-based and action-oriented tactics. The series introduced new ideas, like multiple planes of existence, randomly generated maps and individually distinct characters, all of which have been used in just about everything since. Barcia eventually moved on to other titles, executive producing such hits as Metroid Prime and Need for Speed Undercover. But it will be his contributions via the Master franchise that will forever leave his mark.

In May of 2002, Satoru Iwata became Nintendo Co., Ltd.'s fourth president since the company's founding by Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889. That's quite the accomplishment -- but if you rewind a bit, you'd see that Iwata got his start working for HAL Laboratories. An important contributor to the Kirby games with Masahiro Sakurai, and eventual HAL president, Iwata played key roles in the development of some of Nintendo's most important games.

During the GameCube-era in particular, Iwata's involvement with game development greatly increased. He oversaw work on games such as Super Mario Sunshine, Star Fox Adventures, Metroid Prime, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker among many others. Under Iwata's leadership, Nintendo developments shifted focus away from what other companies were doing to opt for a simpler, more accessible game for the masses.

While these ideas earned Iwata criticism, it's hard to argue with the facts years after his vision began -- During the run of the GameCube Nintendo saw over a 40 percent increase in sales, while the Nintendo DS built an army of followers with games inspired by Iwata's ideals. Moreover, the Wii is immensely popular, selling millions upon millions of systems worldwide to become the most fashionable console this generation. You can trace these successes all the way back to Iwata's earliest contributions with Nintendo gaming -- Earthbound, Adventures of Lolo, and Pokémon were all about fun, appeal and simplicity over an abundance of bells and whistles.

When it comes to videogame scores, few composers in the industry manage to capture emotions of like Jeremy Soule. The award-winning composer has created memorable soundtracks for well over a decade and has been called the "Hans Zimmer of videogames."

As a composer for film in addition to software, Soule is adept at adapting scores for licensed titles, expanding upon them in ways that weren't previously done. His work on the Harry Potter series and Star Wars games, as well as children's franchises like Rugrats and Beauty and the Beast, highlight his versatility and have earned him praise from the likes of BAFTA. But his real strengths lie in huge symphonic productions for battle sequences and medieval-themed games -- as showcased in the multiple Elder Scrolls, Warhammer, and Guild Wars titles in his credits.

Soule's scores range from haunting and mystical to triumphant. In 2006, he won numerous awards for his work on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, arguably his most recognizable score. Soule pours a lot of himself into his pieces, working off real-life events to inject emotion into every soundtrack he composes. His score for Oblivion and Prey were played during the international Play Symphony tour that toured across Europe, North America, and Asia. Soule has contributed to the idea that videogames are an art form and his compositions seem to get better with every project.

Best known for his work as the producer, designer, and lead programmer of the critically-acclaimed PC game Fallout, Timothy Cain has been programming computer games for over two decades.

Prior to his work on the ground-breaking RPG, Cain graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a Master's Degree in Computer Science and went on to work for Interplay Productions. It was here that he created Fallout and did work on titles such as The Bard's Tale Construction Set and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

In addition to designing and programming games, Cain designed and programmed GNW, a user interface and OS-abstraction library that supports Fallout, Atomic Bomberman, and a host of other Interplay titles. His other coding achievements include writing critical error handling code for Stonekeep as well as digital sound mixing code for Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Edition.

Cain contributed to the initial design of 1998's Fallout II, but decided that it was time to part ways with Interplay. He left the company, along with Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson to form Troika Games. Over the next few years, Cain had an active hand on Troika's triad of products; as lead programmer, lead designer, and/or project leader on each. Although each title was generally well-received, Troika was forced to close its doors in 2005 after running into financial trouble.

Tim did not let Troika's closure keep him down, however. In 2007 he was appointed as the Design Director of Carbine Studios. Of his future, Cain told the Escapist, "I am staying in the industry but keeping a much lower profile than I did at Troika. Instead of talking about making games or trying to convince people to play (or publish) my games, I am doing what makes me very happy -- making games."

Prior to designing some of the most recognizable and iconic characters in all of gaming, Tetsuya Nomura started off in vocational school, creating art for magazine advertisements. In 1991 he was hired by SquareSoft to work on the battle graphics for Final Fantasy V's monsters. Following his work on FFV, the young Nomura was appointed graphic director for Final Fantasy VI, a title that earned critical acclaim and is considered one of the best games in the Final Fantasy franchise to this day.

Nomura's big break came when he was chosen as the character designer for Final Fantasy VII. However, his involvement in the project was not limited to character design; Nomura created storyboards for many of the summon sequences and even had an influence in some of the key points in the story. When the game was finally released, his distinctive-looking characters caught the attention of gamers the world over and helped push the already-successful series in a new visual direction. From there he would go on to design the characters for Brave Fencer Musashi, Ergheiz, and Parasite Eve while working closely with Yoshinori Kitase on Final Fantasy VIII, where he was not only the character designer, but also the battle visual director, designing sequences for Limit Breaks and Guardian Force summons.

In 2000, Nomura designed characters for Square's first major releases on the PlayStation 2 platform: the Bouncer and Final Fantasy X. Shortly thereafter, he began work on Kingdom Hearts, not only as the game's character designer, but also as its director. The end result was well-received, and Nomura continued on in the same role for the following installments in the KH series -- Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II.

Today, Nomura continues working for Square Enix as a director and character designer, lending his contemporary style to such projects as Final Fantasy XIII and Dissidia Final Fantasy.

As a child, Tetsuya Mizuguchi had no aspirations to work in the gaming industry. It wasn't until his years spent at Nihon University's Faculty of Arts that he began to look at gaming in a different way.

Mizuguchi's influential career began in 1990, when he joined SEGA. By designing the 1995 arcade racer SEGA Rally Championship, Mizuguchi brought rally-style racing and different driving surfaces to the masses, pleasing racing fans and putting his name on the development map.

Mizuguchi's superiors at SEGA were pleased with his work, and asked him to design a game with a broad enough appeal to draw in casual female gamers (while still appealing to more traditional gamers, too, of course). This request, coupled with Mizuguchi's love of music ultimately led to the 1999 Dreamcast hit Space Channel 5, a music game that required players to memorize dance steps and repeat them back in a Pelmanism-style fashion.

Following Space Channel 5's positive reception, Mizuguchi went to work on the music-driven PlayStation 2 shooter Rez. Although the game garnered a positive critical response, commercial attention in the United States was pretty low.

In 2003, Mizuguchi left SEGA, saying that, "Games are a very unique medium. They exist beyond language, beyond culture, and people are fascinated by games. I don't know how long I will live, but I want to learn more about games -- and there is more to learn about creating better games." He went on to form Q Entertainment, which is now known for its successful music-oriented puzzler Lumines, the DS puzzler Meteos, the Xbox 360 hack and slash adventure Ninety-Nine Nights, and the psychedelic PSP shooter Every Extend Extra.

Mizuguchi's most recent console release, Every Extend Extra Extreme (or E4) was released on the Xbox 360 via its Xbox Live service, bringing an enhanced version of the original 2005 PSP release to a wider audience.

If the casual games boom can be traced back to even a general area, the folks at PopCap Games must certainly be at the epicenter, and Jason Kapalka -- along with Briant Fiete and John Vechey -- is at the center of PopCap.

PopCap actually began as Sexy Action Cool (yes, really, and it was based on a Seattle Metro bus ad for the movie Desperado), but its final name was far more mainstream, helping Kapalka's first PopCap title, the now-nigh-ubiquitous Bejeweled gain more traction and become insanely popular. How popular? The follow-up to Bejeweled Deluxe (PopCap's first commercial game; the original was released for free) has been downloaded over 100 million times.

With the ridiculous success of Bejeweled under his belt, Kapalka went to work pulling inspiration for new causal titles. Alchemy, Zuma, Typer Shark and BookWorm followed with Kapalka on Game Design for the lot of 'em, effectively locking in PopCap as the source for casual games and giving rise to the idea of offering a free regular version and a fairly cheap "Deluxe" full edition. Partnerships that extended PopCap games onto casual gaming portals like Yahoo Games, Station.com and Microsoft GameZone, not to mention heavy porting to devices like cell phones and other non-Windows platforms only fueled the developers' growth and ensured that Kapalka and company would be financially well off for some time to come.

Though Kapalka has been credited with nearly all of PopCap's early successes, the company hasn't been afraid to bring in outside development talent, giving rise to published hits like Pixelus and Insaniquarium, though Kapalka has continued to produce follow-ups to some of the core franchises that helped put PopCap on the map.

Back in the days when adventure games were at their peak, LucasArts made some of the best around. And, in turn, Ron Gilbert made some of the best LucasArts had to offer.

The creative genius behind Maniac Mansion, Gilbert not only made interesting adventure games that are considered genre classics, but he also developed a script system that became the standard for LucasArts adventure games. The Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, better known as SCUMM, made development and porting of adventure games simpler and faster. After Maniac Mansion, Gilbert went on to develop the first two games in the Monkey Island series. The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge both hold up even today as fantastic storytelling examples. They're funny and engaging, with interesting puzzles and memorable characters. The lead, Guybrush Threepwood is a lovably pathetic chap and someone that everyone should meet at least once before their gaming days are over.

After Gilbert left LucasArts he co-founded Humongous Entertainment, a company focusing primarily on kid's software. There he developed adventure titles for a younger audience, like Pajama Sam, as well as the popular Backyard Sports series which included average kids playing with younger versions of professional athletes. Gilbert's other company, Cavedog Entertainment, was short-lived, but he used his time wisely to produce Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation -- one of the greatest RTS games of all time. Most recently, Gilbert tamed up with Hothead Games to help make Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness for Xbox Live and is currently working on his new original property and episodic adventure, DeathSpank.

As an alum of Black Isle Studios, Chris Avellone is one of a select few people who command almost universal adoration from the hardcore PC RPG crowd thanks to penning and designing large portions of games like the Baldur's Gate series (including the first console version, the decidedly more action-driven Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance), Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and its expansions, Neverwinter Nights and perhaps most famously Fallout 2 (which caused a bit of a stir among the Fallout faithful when Bethesda said it was moving closer to the original Fallout's setting and tone), as well as extensive work on the Interplay version of Fallout 3, then code-named Van Buren.

So revered was Avellone's work on Fallout 2 that his Fallout Bible has become the de facto standard for insights into the game's (and series') history, mythology, facts, timelines, development decisions and secrets (among other things), leading to the verbose scribe and game designer's talents being in very high demand indeed.

When Black Isle Studios folded along with the rest of Interplay -- or more specifically when head honcho Feargus Urquhart left -- Avellone followed suit. He wasn't out of work for long; a handful of other BIS mainstays (including Chris Parker, Chris Jones, Darren Monahan and Urquhart) founded Obsidian Entertainment in Irvine, California (keeping with the Orange County setting of Interplay), and have since worked on Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Knights II and the upcoming spy RPG Alpha Protocol for SEGA.

f we're talking old school, Marc Blank is about as old school as you can get. He made computer games in the late '70s before they had graphics. Inspired by the text-based classic, Colossal Cave Adventure, Blank and his friends at MIT programmed the huge and ambitious text adventure Zork.

The game built upon the idea of Adventure, but expanded the limited vocabulary into a database of hundreds of words. Player's weren't limited to simple verb-noun commands – the game could interpret entire sentences. Blank and some of his team formed the development studio Edetic and developed a few more Zork titles. For a while Blank and his team developed software for the Apple Newton, one of the first personal digital assistants on the market. After the Newton's sales dropped the company went back to videogames. Eidetic had a bit of a rough patch in the mid '90s, with the infamously bad Bubsy 3D, widely regarded as one of the worst games of all time.

But Blank and his team didn't stop there and came back with a vengeance in the late '90s, developing a highly-regarded third-person shooter for the original PlayStation that followed an anti-terrorist unit, Syphon Filter. Among the most reputable games released on the PSone, Syphon Filter became a huge hit, prompting Sony to buy Edetic to develop two more Syphon Filter titles before Blank's departure in 2004.

Back in 1985, Louis Castle founded Westwood Studios with his friend Brent Sperry. The duo were always developers of hardcore games, even during their run on a number of Disney titles (Did you play The Lion King for the Genesis? It will kick your ass!). But in 1995 Castle put Westwood on the map with one of the RTS godfathers, Command & Conquer.

Although not the first real-time strategy game, Command & Conquer popularized the genre in tandem with Warcraft during a time when most strategy games used turn-based hex grids and medieval fantasy themes. Adapting its formula from Dune II (considered the blueprint of the modern RTS), Westwood made a complex and addictive strategy opus set in an alternate Earth where factions fight over the precious mineral Tiberium. The game's huge success and numerous awards raised the bar for PC strategy ventures with concepts that still have a foothold today.

When Westwood was purchased by Electronic Arts in 1998, Castle came along for the ride and continued to improve on the popular strategy series. To date, there are more than a dozen Command & Conquer titles in all, spanning nearly every major console and handheld. Don't forget as well, that Command & Conquer was also one of the first real-time strategy games to offer multifaceted competitive online play -- which, as any fan of the genre can tell you, is where the game (and its spin-off series, Red Alert) truly excels. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat is even more satisfying when your opponent is a real person, and without Command & Conquer and Castle's contributions, it may have taken a lot longer for gamers to accept.

World-renowned artist Yoshitaka Amano has been making the Final Fantasy series beautiful for over two decades. His career began at the early age of 16, when he landed a job at Tatsunoku Productions where he was involved in the early anime movement. While working on anime character designs, Amano studied several different styles of illustration, ranging from early 20th century European art to the style seen in Western comic books. He left Tatsunoku Productions in 1982 and was hired to illustrate Vampire Hunter D the following year.

In 1987, Amano ventured into game design when he joined the struggling company SquareSoft to work on what was thought to be its last game, an RPG aptly titled Final Fantasy. The game achieved unprecedented success, and Amano returned as the character designer and illustrator for the next five games in the franchise. Beginning with Final Fantasy VII, the younger, more contemporary Tetsuya Nomura took over the character designs for the landmark series, while Amano continued in his role as illustrator, providing promotional artwork as well as his own impressions of Nomura's characters. He returned once more to design the cast of Final Fantasy IX.

Amano's immediately recognizable style continued to gain worldwide attention and inspire a new generation of artists. In addition to his contributions outside of videogames, including stints on Gaiman's The Sandman, a Vampire Hunter D animated feature, and a couple of Marvel Comics projects, Amano continued to plug away at even more gaming ventures -- Final Fantasies X through XII and El Dorado's Gate among them.

Yoshitaka Amano will continue to act as the title logo designer and image illustrator of the Final Fantasy series, and has been approached by Hironobu Sakaguchi to provide artwork for various titles for his company, Mistwalker.

Bikini-covered double-D breasts and ninja fighting ancient bone dragons are about as far-removed from a 16-bit football game as one could get, but such is the career path for Tomonobu Itagaki and his time spent at Japanese developer Tecmo. Born in 1967, Itagaki was originally brought on to handle the graphics for Tecmo Super Bowl. Itagaki's brash nature wasn't fully seen until he started on his own Dead or Alive series in 1998, which featured female characters with strategically-placed "bounce" physics and more than a passing resemblance to SEGA's Virtua Fighter, a series he has mentioned being a fan of.

When Dead or Alive 2 arrived for the Dreamcast, the graphical leap gave Itagaki and Team Ninja plenty of attention, which in turn fueled the opinionated Itagaki to spout off on a number of topics -- a trend that hasn't seen any ebb since. After reviving Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden franchise and expanding the Dead or Alive games beyond just fighting games to include a mini-game-style adventure, the developer became somewhat synonymous with generously proportioned female characters.

In true fashion, Itagaki-san split from his longterm employer Tecmo in a very heated and very public break on June 2, 2008. He resigned from his role and released a public statement alleging unpaid completion bonuses, with a complaint filed in the Tokyo District Court on May 14, 2008 citing this and also, "such unlawful acts as unreasonable and disingenuous statements made towards [Mr. Itagaki]," from Yoshimi Yasuda, President of Tecmo. The suit claimed damages in total of 148 million yen.

We don't know what's next for Itagaki-san just yet, but with his newfound freedom and a proven well of creativity hiding behind dark sunglasses we're anxious to find out.

While Tom Clancy gets his name on all of the games based on his licenses, people like Mathieu Ferland are the brains behind some of the best interactive action experiences of today.

Amazingly, Ferland first made his mark at Ubisoft working on the Donald Duck-licensed platformer "Goin' Quackers" before moving on to multiple Tom Clancy franchises a year later. Though Mathieu has produced a handful of Rainbow Six titles, it's Splinter Cell that emerged as the perfect vehicle for Ferland's talents.

As the producer for every major Splinter Cell game, Ferland has consistently delivered the industry's greatest stealth hero since Metal Gear's Solid Snake. Among the most ingenious action series out there, Splinter Cell has built a dynasty on its equally satisfying single- and multiplayer modes, smart writing and incredible atmosphere and gadgetry. Thanks to Ferland's guidance, several titles in the series have won multiple awards -- including a few Game of the Year honors -- since its inception seven years ago. It's a great testimony to the quality of the brand.

Ferland continued his legacy with Assassin's Creed in 2007, and despite mixed reactions from the gaming press, the slick-looking platformer did huge sales numbers and offered some truly fantastic concepts and ideas that have already influenced other top notch games in multiple genres (Prince of Persia anyone?).

Best known for his creation of the insanely popular Dragon Ball Manga series, Akira Toriyama's unique illustrative style has powered some of the most important videogame RPG franchises since the 1980s.

Following up on the success of his blockbuster comic, Toriyama was hired as the character and monster designer for Enix's now-legendary Dragon Quest line of videogames more than two decades ago. The combination of Toriyama's artistic prowess and Yuji Horii's scenario designs was a winning formula -- producing what has now become one of the best-selling gaming IPs ever in Japan.

In 1994, Toriyama and Horii teamed up with Hironobu Sakaguchi (the man behind the wildly successful Final Fantasy franchise) for what was hailed as Toriyama's best designs since Dragon Ball. The project? The critically acclaimed Chrono Trigger, which is still considered not only one of the best RPGs of all-time, but also one of the greatest games ever made. Toriyama's work on CT not only gave the game its own distinctive look, but it also introduced gamers to what would be the first of many spiky-haired, sword-wielding protagonists to come.

Following Chrono Trigger, Toriyama oversaw the artistic design of the combatants for the somewhat-obscure Square fighter Tobal No. 1, as well as its cult favorite sequel, Tobal 2 (which never saw a US release) while also continuing his work on Dragon Quest. In 2007, Blue Dragon was released on the Xbox 360 console, and once again, the world took notice of Toriyama's distinct visual approach. Blue Dragon's release reaffirmed Toriyama's position as one of the best videogame artists on the planet, and may have also helped to set a record for Akira-san, who probably has an association with more original franchises with the word "dragon" in it than anyone else.

One of the key members of the LucasArts staff that helped solidify the developer/publisher as the source for consistently great adventure games (a title it had shared with Sierra On-Line for much of the early '90s), Dave Grossman's knack for penning intelligent dialogue and helping to code games like Day of the Tentacle and the first two Monkey Island adventures is what he's best known for. Indeed the SCUMM engine employed by nearly all of LucasArts' adventure games owed more than a little to Grossman's handiwork, and he was regularly tapped to provide assistance to other LA staffers using the engine for games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

Grossman left LucasArts to become a sort of pen-and-fingers-for-hire, freelancing for Ron Gilbert's Humongous Games. Grossman was busy crafting a handful of children's games including the Pajama Sam series before striking out again as a full-time member of the Telltale Games crew (reuniting again with a handful of old LucasArts co-workers after Sam & Max: Freelance Police had the plug pulled in early 2004). Telltale's approach to episodic gaming, ranging from picking up old LA properties like Sam & Max, plus adapting new ones like Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People have helped to give Grossman's position as Senior Designer plenty of weight.

With a clear grasp of what makes dialogue and game writing fun, Grossman's talents as a scribe have helped him branch out to cover a handful of non-gaming-related projects like his Poem of the Week at his personal web site, Phrenopolis, and a book of collected "Guy Poetry."

As the Creative Director for Criterion Games, Alex Ward is uniquely responsible for the company's entire conceptual direction. Considering Criterion's games division was born as much out of a desire to sell its own in-house RenderWare Engine as it was to actually make games, we'd say he's done rather well for himself in a relatively short period of time. Not bad for a guy who graduated from college with a Psychology degree, but then the games industry is nothing if not filled with people who have decidedly un-game-related majors.

Even with a degree, Ward's start in the industry wasn't particularly glamorous: QA for UK-based developer US Gold (which later was folded into Eidos Interactive), and helpdesk call jockey for Acclaim Entertainment (eventually notching public relations and product research titles in the company's UK office). Acclaim would go on to publish the first and second Burnout games before ultimately collapsing, at which point Ward jumped over to Criterion proper. Burnout's blend of daredevil racing and twitchy arcade tendencies lent itself to Ward's first non-racing game for Criterion, Black.

The game, dubbed "gun porn" by Criterion, had its story and screenplay penned by Ward (among others), and he served as one of the game's executive producers. He's continued to guide the company's future releases, including Burnout's move to an open world racer in Burnout Paradise, and often serves as the company spokesman when dealing with the press. From rising up the ranks from the bottom of the industry totem pole to heading up creative duties at one of the most consistently bankable developers, Alex Ward definitely deserves a spot on our list.

A veteran in the gaming industry, the outspoken David Jaffe first got his start as a tester for Sony Imagesoft before earning his design chops with the 1994 platformer Mickey Mania. After completing the well-received side-scroller, Jaffe's involvement with the fledgling Utah-based development studio SingleTrac paid off when he helped produce the original Twisted Metal on PlayStation -- one of the most influential and beloved games of the 32-bit era and the model for all future car combat games to come.

It was Twisted Metal 2, however, that catapulted Jaffe into the limelight. The game was not only met with great success by consumers, but also by critics and fellow game developers. It had done what all sequels are supposed to do -- take an already-engrossing formula and expand upon it in nearly every possible way.

After multiple buyouts and parent company changes, SingleTrac ceased to exist but was eventually reformed by many of its employees, including Jaffe, as Incognito Entertainment. With the support of his friends and colleagues, David took the reins of a number of high profile PlayStation 2 projects and hits. Twisted Metal: Black, considered by many as the best car combat game ever made was overseen by Jaffe himself, while his concepts for the innovative giant creature fighter, War of the Monsters cemented his status as a creative powerhouse.

But it was the voyages of the fallen Spartan warrior Kratos in God of War that made Jaffe a household name with game dorks. A smash blockbuster hit for Sony, God of War turned the action/adventure genre on its head with fantastic boss battles, incredible graphics and some of the most intuitive and responsive gameplay mechanics seen in years. Though Dave passed off the design duties for God of War II a few years later, he still served as creative director before turning his attention back to the driving genre where he helmed the PSN favorite, Calling All Cars.

These days Jaffe works on upcoming projects behind closed doors at Eat, Sleep, Play -- a development studio formed in conjunction with his longtime friend and ex-Incog'r, Scott Campbell. In his spare time, David regularly updates his blog "David Jaffe.biz" where he directly updates fans and admirers with his daily observations.

While many gamers will recognize Todd Howard from his more recent works, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, his career has spanned one of the most turbulent eras in the short history of videogames.

Howard began his professional life in gaming at Bethesda Softworks in 1994, a time when games still shipped on floppy disks and first-person shooters were controlled with arrow keys. But as the technical possibilities for graphics and gameplay have expanded greatly since 1994, Howard's games have always pushed the limits of what is possible in each era. From the mouse swipe melee combat and massive randomly-generated environments of Elder Scrolls: Arena to the narrative of Fallout 3, which begins the minute the player is born, Howard has an impressive track record of pushing gaming into territory that few other designers would dare to go.

Where most designers tend to think in terms of simplicity and economy, Howard's games have been defined by a staggering sense of scale and immersion that few others can match.

"I wish I could give you real, true insight into what we put into our games, and this is not me just trying to sell you, or smooth you over, because I’m Okay, really, if you don’t love what we do," said Howard in a post on Bethesda's forums. "We’re fans; we’re passionate about what we do. We go on a crusade to make the best game we can. We make the game we would run to the store and buy, we argue, we debate, we scream, we stay up all night, we clap and cheer the highs and curse the lows. One day we’ll find a way to make you a fly on the wall in one of our design meetings – they’re pretty damn inspiring."

Satoshi Tajiri is the founder of Game Freak, and the creator of the worldwide phenomenon that is Pokémon. Need we say more?

The inspiration for Pokémon was actually a rather simple one. When Tajiri was a little kid he loved collecting insects. As the years went by and urbanization spread through even the most rural areas of Japan, Tajiri wanted to create something that would capture the excitement and fun of bug hunting. Though the game came out late in the Game Boy's life and wasn't expected to be much of a success, it quickly became one of Nintendo's biggest hits ever and spawned an entirely new universe.

The Pokémon series has grown immensely with each game using the same concept, while expanding upon it with more creatures and gameplay elements. The series won over parents with its lack of graphic violence, and became popular with everyone else because of its addictive RPG-lite game design. A fan of Shigeru Miyamoto, Tajiri has said that his developmental style bears similarities and for good reason -- he sees Miyamoto as a mentor and in the anime, the main rival characters are named Satoshi and Shigeru as homage to his point of view.

Tajiri's company GameFreak specializes almost entirely on Pokémon titles, spinning the series off into a number of different games and genres. And though Pokémon is more popular in Japan than America, Tajiri credits American audiences with understanding the concept better than his countrymen. Instead of focusing solely on Pikachu, American audiences have realized that Pokémon is a concept about partnership and so too is Tajiri's philosophy of "Game and Gamer."

The score to Halo 2 was the first videogame soundtrack to ever reach the Billboard charts. It made a statement about the validity of music in our medium and proved that Marty O'Donnell knows how to craft a memorable tune or two (or 20).

Halo 2's mix of ancient-sounding chants effectively complemented Bungie's grand science fiction universe -- not only in the second Halo but in those that have come before and since as well. After all, O'Donnell has been composing videogame music for years, after he switched to that from doing the jingle for Flintstones vitamins. Marty earned his chops as the sound designer for Riven, the sequel to Myst, and he also worked some of Bungie's earlier games, like Myth. O'Donnell joined Bungie while composing the score for Oni, and after its completion earned his role as Director of Sound Design and Voice Talent for Bungie's then-unannounced project that ultimately became Halo.

Ask anyone on the team -- O'Donnell's audio was instrumental in bringing out the themes and emotions of the games he handled. This connection came from more than just musical composition, as O'Donnell is also skilled in using sound effects and ambient sound to enhance the gameplay experience.

As any fan can tell you, O'Donnell favors the piano in his pieces, as exemplified by the popular original theme for Halo 3. His scores have been commended for their fluidity, and the soundtracks are so continuous that it's often hard to tell where one song ends and another begins. O'Donnell's work has been used in the popular Video Games Live concert tours, and he made a special arrangement of his scores to be played during the festivities. That sounds good to us.

Akira Yasuda's contribution to the videogame industry can't be denied. The prolific artist began his 18-year software stint when he dropped out of college and took a job at Capcom in 1985, working under the pen name "Akiman."

Best known for his illustrative work on Street Fighter II, Akiman worked primarily as the character designer and illustrator for Capcom over the decades, but has also served as a planner or designer on many of the company's other hit franchises. He has played a role in the development of many titles (Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, Final Fight, and Captain Commando, just to name a few) and is responsible for designing some of the most well-known and beloved characters in popular gaming culture -- including the Street Fighter series' own Blanka, Guile, and Chun Li.

One of Akiman's first projects was the package illustration for the 1986 NES shooter 1942. He went on to provide original artwork for Side Arms Hyper Dyne before working on the 1989 beat 'em up Final Fight. Akiman later joined forces with fellow planner/designer Akira Nishitani (otherwise known as "Nin-Nin") to formulate the sequel to 1987's Street Fighter. Of course, history was made when that project, appropriately named Street Fighter II, hit arcades worldwide in 1991. SF2 redefined the fighting genre and has since spawned numerous sequels, spin-offs, and clones from competitors and even Capcom itself.

In 2003 Akiman left Capcom and went freelance, dabbling in manga and anime while still doing illustration work in games. 2004's Red Dead Revolver and the 2007 PSP release Brave Story are the most recent titles to feature his character designs, though they're certainly not the last.

Nick and Julian Gollop were indie devs and pubs before it was officially a movement. Through a series of self-written and -published early strategy games in their native England, the brothers built for themselves quite a following. Julian Gollop begin making games in the early '80s on a Sinclair ZX81 (a favorite jumping-off point of many of the folks on our list, actually) before eventually graduating to the Sinclair spectrum. Both bits of early hardware helped form the lessons that would allow them to enter the industry in 1982 while still attending school. Time Lords and Islandia were both birthed for BBC Mirco, then came Nebula and Rebelstar Raiders for publisher RedShift.

The time spent at RedShift was instrumental in building a strategy foundation for the Gollop's future endeavors, but it was while attending the London School of Economics in the study of economics (naturally) and sociology that Julian birthed Chaos for Games Workshop (yes, the Warhammer folks) and Rebelstar for Firebird, a budget label of larger Mirrorsoft (who were embroiled in all the Tetris licensing hoopla in the late '80s).

The success of his early titles gave Julian the gumption to form Target games with his brother Nick and set to work on Laser Squad and Lords of Chaos, the RPG-tinged sequel to the original Games Workshop title. It would be the sequel to Laser Squad, renamed X-COM: UFO Defense that would put the brothers (and their re-christened Mythos Games dev house) on the map. X-COM was a runaway success for the Gollops and publisher MicroProse.

A series of sequels followed, including a third follow-up to Chaos dubbed Magic & Mayhem and an attempt at reworking the original X-COM as a 3D title for Virgin Interactive, but the publisher was scooped up by France-based Titus and funding was cut. Mythos eventually became Codo Technologies and the Gollops have continued to ply their trade with sequels like Laser Squad Nemesis and Rebelstar: Tactical Command.

Music rhythm games are so complicated these days, what with their fake instruments and their downloadable content. Back in the day all we needed for a good rhythm game was a rapping puppy in an orange hat, and a talking onion that could teach him kung fu. And boy did Masaya Matsuura give us that!

Matsuura took a concept not yet seen in videogames, combined it with the crude, yet lovable art of Rodney Greenblat, and made PaRappa the Rapper, a memorable game about hip-hopping your way through life. The game has seen a sequel, and a spiritual successor with Um Jammer Lammy. Sure, Matsuura's PaRappa didn't invent the rhythm game, but it is largely responsible for making it popular. The style was unique, the songs were hilarious and catchy, and the ability for players to freestyle to earn more points gave it a more open gameplay experience than other rhythm efforts. The Parappa series is incredibly fun, bursting with personality and great characters.

And then there were the songs -- which were all over the place across the three games. Players rapped about making noodles, rocked out with lumberjacks, helped a giant caterpillar care for dozens of babies, and helped land a crashing plane, all through the power of music. Matsuura has gone on to do other unique classics like Vib-Ribbon and Tamagotchi Connection, and will be throwing his hat back into the music rhythm game ring once again with the upcoming Major Minor's Majestic March rather soon.

Jonty Barnes has been a name that was generally tacked on after Peter Molyneux, but his credentials certainly speak to more than that. He worked his way up at Bullfrog testing Populous II before earning programming duties on the quirky Theme Hospital and design duties on classics like Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper. In other words, you have Barnes to thank in part for the accidental death of millions of digital lives in the early-to-mid '90s.

In the later '90s he migrated over to Lionhead Studios with Molyneux and assisted in the production of the ambitious Black and White titles. That's a pretty big deal, as Black and White did things nobody had ever seen before. It was a game that was literally overwhelming with its possibilities. While playing a god was an idea that technology couldn't accurately portray at the time, the game still offered some fantastic gameplay options -- changing the way we looked at "God Sims" forever.

The ambition and enthusiasm for the title is a skill Barnes used later when he joined the Bungie team to head up production for Halo 3. One of the major advances in Xbox 360-exclusive installment was the increase in scale. There were more enemies, bigger environments, and sometimes up to a dozen AI Marines working with the player on screen to simulate a more realistic futuristic war. And it became a smarter game too, with the AI doing things with a focus on gameplay, instead of just looking cool -- all things Barnes had shown a penchant for in his other games over the years.

As a producer Barnes has taken his skills from working on games that offer huge worlds, and hundreds of people, and channeled that into expanding the Halo franchise in a similar direction. We have a feeling that Jonty's time in the spotlight is far from over.

Eugene Jarvis is clearly in love with arcade games, and rightly so -- he was instrumental in helping the burgeoning arcade industry effectively give birth to the modern videogame. His tenure during the Golden Age of arcade games development is the stuff of legend, with creation or co-creation credits for classics like Defender and Blaster and Robotron: 2084 during the earliest of early days at Atari.

It didn't start that way, of course; like most early pioneers of the industry, Jarvis had another gig. Unlike most early pioneers, the pre-videogames gig (with Hewlett-Packard) lasted all of couple weeks before he got a call from the folks at Atari. Less than a month later and his Atari superiors had left, leaving Jarvis with the unenviable task of giving The Fuji's pinball division a continuous shot in the coin-op arm.

It was not to be, however, but Atari begat a chance to continue the early bit of dabbling he'd done with games when he headed to Williams. It would appear he was up to the task, going on to create the titles mentioned above, plus more modern arcade hits as Williams became Midway such as Smash TV, NARC and the Cruis'n series that kicked off with the original Cruis'n USA.

After years of creating arcade games for others, Jarvis eventually formed Raw Thrills the better part of a decade ago, pulling in a handful of his old Midway buddies to continue building original and license-based arcade games, some of which piggyback off more tried-and-true bits of gameplay such as The Fast and the Furious being patterned off the Crusin' titles.

The multi-talented Stieg Hedlund is a figure that stands out in the industry for many reasons. Toting over 20 years of experience working on games of nearly every genre, Hedlund is best known as the man behind the best-selling PC game Diablo II.

Hedlund's videogame career began in 1987, when he landed a position at Infinity Software, a small publisher that put out games for the Amiga, Macintosh, and Commodore 64. Three years later, Hedlund left Infinity to work for Japanese publisher Koei, where he was the lead designer for a handful of its titles.

Eventually, after working on an unreleased Lord of the Rings project for Electronic Arts, Hedlund went to work for SEGA Technical Institute in 1994. There he was the lead designer for Die Hard Arcade, The Ooze, Comix Zone, and the unreleased Sonic-X-treme. However, it wasn't until his move to Blizzard North (then named Condor Software) that he gained true recognition. After the release of Diablo, Hedlund became the sole designer the game's sequel, Diablo II. When it was released in 2000 it was an instant success, earning critical and commercial accolades and went on to become the second best-selling PC game of all time.

In the aftermath of Diablo II's success, Hedlund took part in the design of StarCraft and the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion pack before departing from Blizzard North and joining Konami as its Creative Director. Two years later, he moved on to Ubisoft/Red Storm Entertainment, acting as the creative director on several of the Tom Clancy games, including Ghost Recon 2 and Rainbow 6: Lockdown.

The nomadic Hedlund changed companies once again in 2004, taking a position at Perpetual Entertainment as the Design Director on the ill-fated MMORPG Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising. Perpetual closed its doors in early 2008, and Hedlund founded the independent design firm Turpitude Design.

Now acting as Turpitude's Chief Creative Officer, Stieg's main goal, as stated on the Turpitude web page, is "to create awesome games that are fun, innovative, and 'sticky'." Given his impressive resume and invaluable experience in the gaming industry, there is no doubt that he will achieve that goal time and time again.

Jason West is the Chief Technology Officer and one of the co-founders of Infinity Ward, the development studio behind one of the pinnacles of war shooters, Call of Duty.

West has been in the industry for years with various high-profile games to his credit. He was part of the lead team at 2015 that worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault before they broke off to form the aforementioned Infinity Ward. But it was Call of Duty that created a new benchmark for World War II titles.

The ways in which the West-lead Call of Duty made war games more believable and challenging are numerous. Whether it was the smarter allied AI that actually works with the player as a squad in addition to an enemy intelligence that reacts to and flanks your team, or the removal of the standard health bar years before the feature became commonplace, the game's influences reach far and wide -- and it's Jason West that's in large part responsible.

West and Infinity Ward's improvements and innovations often become industry standards for first-person shooters. As project lead for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, West created one of the most critically acclaimed games of this generation, earning numerous awards and accolades, that has already influenced other FPS titles and likely many more for years to come.

Like action/adventure games? Then send a thank you letter to Jordan Mechner because the dude pretty much invented the genre.

Back in 1989 Mechner created Prince of Persia, a platformer that combined unique puzzles, interesting traps, and impressive animations into a single cinematic package. The premise was simple enough and the game became an instant classic, being ported to nearly every major format available at the time. The influence of the Prince of Persia and its sequels can be seen in numerous platformer and action titles made ever since. It charted new territory for videogames that people hadn't previously thought of.

Later, Mechner used his already-established originality to create The Last Express, a mystery-adventure set on the Orient Express that offered unique gameplay elements like a rewind system instead of saving. It also featured digital rotoscoping technology to convert live action to animation. The game was not a financial sensation, but it did enjoy a cult following and helped popularize techniques later used for films like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.

When Ubisoft wanted to revive the Prince of Persia franchise they called on Mechner, who worked tirelessly to write a compelling script for the successful reboot, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It was simple and elegant, and was the perfect spiritual successor to his original work, bringing the Prince into the current generation without feeling dated. Even though Mechner's resume isn't as packed as some of the other creators on our list, all of his games are a hell of a lot of fun, and still hold up to this day.

There are few who are as dedicated to their craft as Yasunori Mitsuda. He has pulled countless all-nighters, and worked through stomach ulcers and several other physical ailments to bring gamers some truly memorable music compositions.

Initially, Mitsuda was gearing his life towards that of a professional golfer before rekindling his childhood appreciation of music in high school (thanks to the scores of such films as Blade Runner and The Pink Panther). After graduating, he attended the Junior College of Music in Tokyo, where he gained valuable experience in and out of the classroom.

In April of 1992, after what he has referred to as a "disastrous" interview, Mitsuda was hired by SquareSoft as a sound composer, providing sound effects rather than music. In 1994, he famously gave Square's vice-president, Hironobu Sakaguchi (the man behind Final Fantasy) an ultimatum, stating that if he was not allowed to compose music, he would quit. His demand was met; Sakaguchi assigned him to work on the now-legendary Chrono Trigger under the watchful eye of veteran composer Nobuo Uematsu. After finishing Chrono Trigger, Mitsuda and Uematsu joined forces once more to work on Front Mission: Gun Hazard.

Mitsuda composed several more soundtracks for Square, and after completing the score for the 1998 RPG Xenogears, left the company to go freelance. He continued to work closely with Square, however, composing several more memorable musical tracks on such games as the PSX follow-up to Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, as well as a number of post-Square projects like Shadow Hearts I and II, Xenosaga Episode I, and Luminous Arc.

Not bad for a guy who originally wanted to hit golf balls instead of musical notes.

As VP of Product Development, fans of Rockstar Games owe a big "thank you" to Jeronimo Barrera. He's been working for Rockstar since the late '90s and has helped shape nearly every major title the company has released.

Barrera earned his chops on Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, the only skateboarding game to actually hold up against Tony Hawk during the game's heyday, but had plenty of other games under his belt, too -- including Grand Theft Auto 2 and III. Midnight Club took racing games and expanded the track to an entire city, changing the way future racing games were developed. The Warriors took a retro movie license and revitalized it, managing to stay true to the film and be a lot of fun. And let's not forget Bully, that game that was going to teach our kids to beat up teachers, but instead turned out to be a funny, engaging look into the life of a teenager.

Let's not forget about his unflinching envelope -pushing with games like Manhunt 2 (which also makes him one of the few people to have seen those unedited death scenes) and one of the best overall games of our generation, Grand Theft Auto IV. Throughout his career Barrera has shown a passion and excitement for the projects he's working on. He helps promote the games in interviews that show he has an understanding of what makes a game fun, and what Rockstar fans and he as a gamer himself are looking for.

Like a few other people on our list, Bruce Shelley hails from the hallowed halls of MicroProse. Like fellow alums Sid Meier, he's since gone on to start his own company, but Shelley's origins couldn't have been more fitting for the career as a strategy games designer that he's made a name for himself in. Originally a co-founder at a traditional pen-and-paper RPG house, Shelley got his feet wet in crafting board games first and took those lessons learned into his starting gigs in the games industry.

In a perfect example of the cyclical nature of relationships in gaming, Shelley eventually left MicroProse, freelanced here and there and decided to hook back up with his pen-and-paper pals to form Ensemble Studios in 1995, which jumped right into all but printing cash with the Age of Empires series for Microsoft. The partnership was a long and fruitful one, with Shelley's role as Senior Game Designer helping to sculpt the direction of the developer's easy to learn/tough to master strategy concepts.

Given Shelley and Ensemble's enviable track record crafting one successful Age of Empires game (and the obvious expansions each spawned) after another, plus a turn at building a console RTS in Halo Wars, it was especially surprising to hear Microsoft had shut the dev house down, but with his knack for seemingly being able to build consistently great games, there's little doubt he'll be away from things for long.

Former Capcom employee Hideki Kamiya has brought gamers a collection of truly amazing titles throughout his flourishing career. Inspired by 8- and 16-bit classics like Xevious, Gradius, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Kamiya first gained fame as the planner for Resident Evil 1 before stepping into the role of director for the 1998 sequel; a game that is widely considered one of the best (if not the best) in the entire series thus far.

Due to Resident Evil 2's overwhelming success, it's no surprise that development on the third installment began (this time under Capcom's Production Studio 4), with Kamiya once again directing the project. A year later it was readily apparent that what he was working on had become a radical departure from what had already been established with the first two Resident Evil games. This new endeavor ultimately became the ultra-cool, ultra-stylish action/adventure Devil May Cry.

In a surprising move by Capcom, Hideaki Itsuno was appointed director on Devil May Cry 2, a decision that completely blind-sided Kamiya. Paranoid that his job at Capcom was in danger, Kamiya went on to direct the original Viewtiful Joe, which was well-received by critics and gamers alike. He migrated to Clover Studio and began working on the Japanese folklore-inspired "Game of the Year" winner (and frequent example used in the popular "games are art" debate), Okami.

Now a member of Platinum Games with other big names like Shinji Mikami, Yuta Kimura, Nao Ueda, and several others, Kamiya continues to develop cutting-edge videogames to this day. His sexually-charged actioner Bayonetta is the next project in his illustrious career, and with an approach to videogame design that involves treating each new project as though they were one of his own children, we don't expect his passion for creating unique gaming experiences to let up any time soon.

Despite being an employee at Konami for almost 20 years, Koji Igarashi's love affair with the hit Castlevania franchise did not begin until he was assigned as the assistant director, scenario writer, and programmer for 1997's PSX classic Symphony of the Night. Prior to SoTN, Iga (as his fellow chums call him) worked as a programmer on an unreleased simulation title. From there he handled programming duties on Gradius II and Detana!! Twin Bee, before moving on to become the scenario writer for the dating sim Tokimeki Memorial. It was after he completed Tokimeki that he asked to be transferred to the Castlevania series, as he didn't have any ideas for a sequel.

Good move.

After completing Symphony of the Night, which to this day is recognized by many as the single best Castlevania game and among the greatest 32-bit games ever made, Iga went on to serve as the producer on Castlevania: Chronicles, and has remained in that position ever since.

In 2002, Igarashi's controversial decision to remove Castlevania Legends, Castlevania 64, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon from the continuity with the rest of the series was met with some resistance by fans, but he was soon forgiven when he produced a string of fantastic GBA and DS Castlevanias modeled in the vein of Symphony of the Night. Most diehard fans would even argue that Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia were even better than the PS One classic that inspired them.

Whatever the future may hold for Koji Igarashi is still unknown, but given his history and contributions to the franchise he holds so dear, chances are good that he'll continue to produce fantastic gaming experiences.

Jordan Weisman is an entrepreneurial juggernaut. He's started more companies than most people work for in their life. He's also behind the MechWarrior games, some of the highest selling and most acclaimed PC games of all time, and the franchise that's considered by many as the very definition of mech battling games. The combat mechanics and graphics were incredible for their time, and honestly the game still doesn't look bad nearly 15 years later. Oh, and Weisman is also responsible for creating the Crimson Skies series, one of the most entertaining and stylish flight combat games around.

Creating the MechWarrior and Crimson Skies series is reason enough to get on this list, but Weisman has done a hell of a lot more for flavor. He isn’t limited to the videogame industry, after all. He founded FASA Corporation, a company that makes pen-and-paper RPGs, including Battletech and Shadowrun, both of which have had numerous videogame versions. He also founded WizKids, a company that focuses on figurine games like Mage Knight, Heroclix, and its Halo spinoff version Haloclix. Weisman has also had a foray into alternate reality games, and is the mind behind the I Love Bees promo for Halo 2. He's even made an interactive novel, Cathy's Book, which sounds like, but is way cooler than, a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Weisman has had his hand in nearly every cookie jar imaginable, helping to expand the worlds and characters of videogames into unique franchises and ideas.

Takashi Tezuka is one of the most revered names in the gaming industry, and with good reason. As one of Nintendo's main designers, Tezuka has co-directed many of the company's iconic titles. Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, Super Smash Bros., Pikmin, and Animal Crossing have all been touched by Tezuka in some way, shape, or form.

Tezuka's tenure at Nintendo began back in 1984 after he graduated from Osaka University of Arts' Design Department, working alongside Shigeru Miyamoto ever since. Their first title together, Devil World, was released for the Famicom at the tail end of 1984. Once complete, work on Super Mario Bros. began, with Tezuka taking the role of assistant director. The 8-bit exploit of the portly plumber was an instant success, but Tezuka and Miyamoto did not stop there. Tezuka worked on Miyamoto's next innovation, The Legend of Zelda, not only as assistant director, but also as the game's graphic designer. Subsequently, he co-directed Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 before stepping into the role of lead director on the first 16-bit Mario title, Super Mario World.

Since then, Tezuka has continued to serve as a director, producer, designer, or supervisor on all major Mario titles, up to and including New Super Mario Bros for Nintendo's handheld DS system, and the innovative Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. He has also directed The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as well as Link's Awakening, and was also an advisor/supervisor on Ocarina of Time. He produced Pikmin 2 and, more recently, the Animal Crossing series.

Tezuka's creative genius has given gamers just over two decades of incredible software. Now acting as a general manager of Nintendo's Entertainment and Analysis division along with long-time partner Miyamoto, we can be sure to enjoy more quality games from this visionary chap.

The videogame landscape was changed forever when young upstart Yuji Horii joined forces with acclaimed Manga artist Akira Toriyama and music composer Koichi Sugiyama to create the first installment of the pioneering Dragon Quest franchise more than 20 years ago.

Originally a freelance writer for several newspapers, magazines, and comics, Horii entered (and placed) in a programming contest with a tennis computer game that was sponsored by a talent-hungry Enix. Yuji-san was hired on as a programmer, and after creating a handful of simple game designs, was inspired by American RPGs like Ultima and Dungeons & Dragons to fashion what ultimately became the scenarios for DQ.

Dragon Quest's 1986 release came at a time when console RPGs where close to non-existent. Horii's scenarios, along with Toriyama's vibrant character designs and Sugiyama's striking musical score were a recipe for success that revolutionized the role-playing genre and triggered somewhat of a gaming explosion in Japan. Dragon Quest's debut also gave rise to other well-known role-playing franchises, including SquareSoft's iconic Final Fantasy series.

Following Dragon Quest's huge commercial dominance, Horii went on to produce several more scenarios for the franchise's many follow-ups before finally gaining full directorship of Dragon Quest VII in 2000. Of course, some would argue that Horii's shining moment came years earlier in 1995 when he teamed up with Hironobu Sakaguchi and several other SquareSoft alumni to assemble the widely-celebrated SNES RPG, Chrono Trigger.

These days, Horii heads his own production company, Armor Project, which has an exclusive contract with Square-Enix where he continues to oversee the line of Dragon Quest DS remakes and upcoming sequels.

Easily one of the most enterprising folks on our list, Irish developer Dave Perry seemed to have a connection to crossover licenses from the moment he began making games professionally. He broke into the industry in his mid-teens, first pulling from, and then submitting, games to magazines in the UK as nothing but code.

It was his move to the US working for Virgin Games in 1991 that helped him understand the facets of working with pre-existing licenses, ranging from Global Gladiators (a McDonald's property) to Cool Spot (7-Up's mascot) to Aladdin (yes, the Disney one). He quickly moved into a production and managerial role, and in 1993 formed Shiny Entertainment in Laguna Beach, CA. Shiny's first game, Earthworm Jim, was ported to multiple systems, was turned into a cartoon, spawned a line of toys and helped put the company on the map.

Subsequent licensing deals and collaborations -- most notably with the Wachowskis on Enter the Matrix and The Matrix: Path of Neo -- continued Perry's string of crossover partnerships. Shiny was scooped up by Atari in 2002, and Perry left four years later to begin extensive consultation work, including helping the new, rebooted, Korean-owned and MMO-focused Acclaim find its footing. He currently operates something of a games consulting empire, representing industry talent, fostering fledgling indie developers and serves as an advisor for the Game Developers Conference.

Perry has long been eager to self-promote, and has set up his own self-titled domain as something of a games development portal, linking those trying to break into the industry with existing development houses and tirelessly updating visitors on the status of his myriad consultation and advisory roles.

Keiji "Inafking" Inafune is regarded as the father of Mega Man. And while he has admitted that the actual design for Mega Man was more of his mentor's work, Inafune is still considered the mastermind. Largely in part because at the age of 22, Inafune created every other character in the game, did the design sheets and artwork for the booklets, and was the person responsible for converting all the artwork designs into sprite form (a sprite set that consisted mostly of blue tones, thus the main reason Mega Man is the blue bomber).

Luckily since Capcom decided to let the team continue the Mega Man franchise even after disappointing sales of the original, Inafune got to create hundreds of other characters, including Mega Man's many successors. In fact, most of Capcom's famous faces have come from the mind of Inafune, whether directly or in concept. Inafking has worked on most of the franchise's titles, and is the creator of both the Mega Man X and Mega Man Battle Network installments.

Inafune-san is also responsible for the popular samurai adventure series, Onimusha, and is even writing the movie based upon it. More recently, Inafune has been the producer for Dead Rising and Lost Planet, two new franchises for Capcom that have been met with critical and commercial success. And even with all the games and character under his belt, Inafune will of course always be remembered as the graphic designer for Duck Tales on the NES. Score!

Though plenty of Japanese developers will grace our list (and rightly so), few of them have had a string of successes like Atsushi Inaba, who has had his hand in some of Capcom's most impressive franchises -- first as a part of Capcom proper, then spun off as head of Clover Studios and then, when Capcom unceremoniously pulled the plug on that venture, went on to form what would eventually become Platinum Games.

His work overseeing production on projects like both Viewtiful Joe games and the Ace Attorney series, and contributing to everything from Resident Evil: Code Veronica X to Devil May Cry while still at Capcom was the byproduct of more than eight years of experience at the company, and from stints with SNK and Irem before that. He's been one of the driving productive forces throughout one of Capcom's most successful and creative periods in the company's history, helping to birth a number of critically and commercially successful new IPs, then steering the direction of former Clover co-workers at Platinum Games as they brokered a publishing deal with SEGA.

Games like Okami and God Hand during Clover's days were all overseen by Inaba, and when he and a handful of former Clover employees jumped ship to start their own development studio, he helped to oversee the entire production run, culminating in his most current work in the upcoming MadWorld. Though he's certainly gotten his hands dirty development-wise, it's his managerial and production roles that have been tapped most recently and to fantastic effect.

A pioneer in the sports game genre, Scott Orr is just as responsible for the success of the Madden Football series as Richard Hilleman is. After all, it was Orr who was brought on to help redesign the disappointing Apple II football game and it was Orr, under Hilleman's guidance, who shaped how the game would look, play and feel -- creating what then became the iconic Madden game. This is back in the day when a two-man team could do most of the work and get away with it.

Hilleman and Orr went in different directions in the EA Sports universe, but their influences and contributions continued on in all the right places. Orr remained on Madden, improving the game every year with new graphical features, smarter AI, and updated stats. The franchise stayed excellent as it moved from two dimensions into three and the sheer number of critical awards and sales numbers that stack up every year attest to that.

Though Orr's team has grown from a handful of passionate fans to an army of more than 30 developers and a dozen designers, Madden NFL hasn't lost its step and remains the best-selling videogame series in North America for a reason: passion. But Orr's ambitions didn't stop at the gridiron. ike Hilleman, Orr went on to develop numerous other EA Sports titles, including the NASCAR games and the NCAA Football and Basketball titles. EA Sports is a huge brand now, offering gamers a diverse amount of quality sports titles, and Orr helped start and maintain that trend with his work on Madden and other franchises.

Orr left EA in 2001 and went on to form his own company to make mobile phone games.

What Yu Suzuki was to SEGA's arcade business, Yuji Naka was to its home consoles. Originally hired by SEGA in the early '80s as a programmer, Naka handled most of the leadership duties for early Master System games like Spy vs. Spy, F16 Fighting Falcon and the first two Phantasy Star games. But it was his collaboration in 1991 with Hirokazu Yasuhara and Naoto Oshima on Sonic the Hedgehog that would propel him to true superstardom.

The same year, SEGA's AM8 studio changed its name to Sonic Team, and began cranking out a number of high-profile releases, including future Sonic sequels throughout the Master System/ Genesis/ Saturn/ Dreamcast days. For years, Nintendo's designers were challenged by Naka's highly competitive interpretation of genres the Big N had previously dominated, and by a number of reinventions of the Sonic character that took him into worlds beyond the standard platformer.

It could (and has been) argued that without Naka's many contributions to the creation and continuation of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, that SEGA would be a much different company than it is today.

Further hits like Burning Rangers and NiGHTS Into Dreams for the Saturn and Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast continued Naka's legacy, but in early 2006, Yuji-san left to create his own studio dubbed Prope (pronounced "pro-peh" from the Latin term for "near" or "beside"). Naka's new studio is partly funded by SEGA, who has automatic first publishing rights which it has exercised with Prope's first projects -- the acclaimed Wii-exclusive rhythm title Let's Tap and the virtual "catch simulator" appropriately named Let's Catch.

Earlier this year, Naka told us in a one-on-one interview that "Being the father of Sonic and being involved with him for 15 years [leaves me] very attached and fond of him still."

The same could be said of how the games industry feels about Mr. Naka's contributions to our craft.

Many, many developers will work their whole lives and never build up the kind of credibility or attention that the folks on our list have garnered. Fumito Ueda did it with the first game he directed -- which incidentally, was only the second game he'd worked on (the first being an animator on Kenji Eno's Enemy Zero). How's that for success? Of course, when your first game as director is Ico, it's a little understandable that people would come to look at you as a wunderkind.

Ueda's knack for creating atmospheric puzzle playgrounds with mute or near-mute characters instills a sense of isolation, yet provides an endearing feeling of hope as the protagonists seek simply to find an exodus or redemption from their weather-worn, ornate prisons. Ico, a project that started first on the original PlayStation but eventually moved to the PS2, created a world that would serve as a foil for Ueda and his team's follow-up, Shadow of the Colossus.

Again combining a character that had no dialogue with a world beaten and desolate that was populated only by a series of lumbering, interactive puzzles, Shadow made for an intensely memorable experience, and one that's gone on to inspire more than a few other developers since. In just two games, Ueda has given "Team Ico" the kind of freedom within Sony that development teams can only dream of, rivaled only by Polyphony Digital's Kazunori Yamauchi, despite the two Team Ico games selling a fraction of what Gran Turismo has banked.

Still, when one can prove themselves so readily in such a short amount of time, it gives both publisher and fans alike reason to expect great things in the future, which is precisely why the whole industry is bracing for the eventual reveal of Ueda and Team Ico's PlayStation 3 project.

Regarded by some as the current mastermind of real-time graphics, and the counterpart to id Software's John Carmack, graphics guru Tim Sweeney has had a gargantuan impact on the gaming world. Beginning with the creation of Epic Games (then called Epic MegaGames) in 1991, Tim Sweeney changed the face of videogames forever.

Aside from designing and programming games such as ZZT and Jill of the Jungle in the early 90's, Sweeney wrote the original Unreal Engine for use in the first-person shooter Unreal. This landmark introduced breakthrough technologies that included dynamic colored lighting, volumetric fog, and real-time 3D level-building tools. Consequently it became the basis of games across the PC platform and multiple videogame consoles.

Sweeney has gone on to direct Epic's engine development through the current generation of gaming, where Unreal Engine 3 has garnered the support of many of the gaming industry's heavy-hitting companies (Atari, Capcom, Konami, and Square-Enix to name a few) and is now powering everything from the tactical shooters Gears of War 2 and Rainbow Six 6 Vegas to the turn-based RPG Lost Odyssey.

In a 2008 interview with Team Xbox, Sweeney discussed his plans for UE3 and UE4, saying, "Unreal Engine 3 will last throughout this whole console cycle. I expect that youll see games shipping with Unreal Engine 3 in 2011, 2012 and may be even a year after that... For games that begin shipping in 2012, well have Unreal Engine 4, whatever that is, with a major new architecture and major new feature set, and there youll see significant changes..."

Whatever those significant changes are, we can only imagine. However, thanks to Tim Sweeney's extraordinary contributions, we know that those changes will continue to revolutionize the look of games for years to come.

Known in several circles as the "John Williams of videogame music," Nobuo Uematsu is widely considered one of the best composers in gaming history. A self-taught musician, Uematsu-san began working for SquareSoft in 1985, when an acquaintance (and part-time Square employee) offered him a job creating music for the game known as Genesis. His work on the score was good enough to land him a full-time position as part of Square's composing team, where he scored several games for the NES and Famicom Disc Systems while working part-time at a music rental store. In 1987, he met Hironobu Sakaguchi and agreed to compose the music for a game that would either make or break the entire company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy; that game was Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy's soundtrack gained attention for its distinctive melodies and unique style. Following the game's success, Square hired Uematsu-san as the composer for the next installment in the franchise. He remained in that position for over a decade, writing the music for the IP's first ten titles. In addition to his many Final Fantasies, he also composed tracks in Chrono Trigger, Front Mission: Gun Hazard, and even Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Uematsu's music has had a massive impact on videogame soundtracks. His love ballad for Final Fantasy VIII, titled Eyes on Me and sung by Chinese pop star Faye Wong, became a hit outside of the gaming community, taking home the "Song of the Year (Western Music)" award at the 14th Annual Japan Gold Disc Awards in 1999. In 2001, Uematsu-san was named as an innovator in Time Magazine's Time 100: The Next Wave - Music feature, and his composition "Theme of Love" from Final Fantasy IV was used in a Japanese piano music book intended for grade school students.

In 2004, Uematsu-san left Square-Enix and formed his own company, Smile Please. He continues to compose music for Square-Enix as a freelancer, as well as for Hironobu Sakaguchi's company, Mistwalker.

Ed Logg has had such a long and storied history with arcade games that it's hard not to love the guy's persistence. Even today, with arcades all but vanished -- and a far, far cry from where they used to be back in the early '80s heyday, where Logg first cut his teeth on games like Asteroids (which he co-developed/created with Lyle Rains), Centipede (and, by natural extension Millipede) and Gauntlet for Atari -- Logg continues to press on, or did at least until Midway finally shut down its Arcade operations completely.

When Atari broke off into separate arcade and home units, and spun off its home conversions under the Tengen name, Logg went along with it, helping to craft the home versions of not only his existing arcade projects, but a handful of others as well -- including a little game called Tetris that became the source of a bitter, protracted battle between parties that all felt they'd licensed the game properly and thus owned the exclusive rights, with Logg privy to (but not entirely involved in) the bulk of it. Eventually Tengen would go on to create unlicensed games for the NES.

Logg's tenure with Tengen and what was originally dubbed Atari Games was extensive, riding out one of the most convoluted series of exchanges of ownership, bids by former heads (including original Atari founder Nolan Bushnell), and company name changes and reversals due to legal issues ever. Eventually, Atari Games became Midway Games West, where Logg continued to help pump out games like the San Francisco Rush series.

Long before World of Warcraft redefined the definition of "popular" among massively multiplayer online role-playing games, yet far enough removed from early efforts like Meridian 59 or The Realm or even Ultima Online, there was EverQuest. McQuaid and Smedley happened to be at the center of what would be a perfect storm for the then-budding MMO scene. When EverQuest essentially put the barely-formed (or at least named) Verant Interactive on the map, only to have the fairly new Sony Online Entertainment happily gobble them up, it was McQuaid who would guide things (at least for a time) as Chief Creative Officer with Smedley serving as head of the studio.

EverQuest's success at the hands of both men is undeniable, but in 2002 they parted ways with McQuaid forming Sigil Studios to work on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, while Smedley stayed on with SOE where he continues to oversee Sony's MMO-based business to this day. Though Vanguard was to be originally published by Microsoft, eventually Sigil bought back the rights and re-negotiated a deal a bit closer to home by having SOE publish the game, effectively reuniting Smedley and McQuaid for a time. Neither Sony Online Entertainment nor Sigil Studios have managed to recapture the attention and success of the early days of the original EverQuest, though SOE under Smedley has shipped a number of massively multiplayer online games since.

Whatever modern-day results may come, the partnership between John Smedley and Brad McQuaid did, in a very real sense, pave the way for future MMOs, making them genuine figureheads of what is now a billion dollar business.

If you're going to put in the hard hours at a company, the list of prospects better than Blizzard Entertainment isn't terribly long. Some might even say the house that Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo built is at the top of that list, which probably explains why Bill Roper has spent so much of his career there building those aforementioned titles -- in particular the latter one as part of the Blizzard North team. Roper's extensive history, not surprisingly, shares a very common theme of role-playing games, but then that's always been Blizzard's bread and butter.

After handling a myriad of audio duties ranging from composition to voice work on some of Blizzard's earliest titles, Roper quickly began to wear quite a few hats, ranging from scriptwriting to manual design to, eventually, a production and oversight role with subsequent entries in Blizzard's flagship series. Fittingly, when he left the company to start his own, christening it Flagship Studios (which would only release Hellgate: London before closing its doors), most of the RPG experience would come to be something of an asset. Even after Flagship was shut down, Roper quickly found a home at Cryptic Studios working on Champions Online, and plying much of his considerable experience with the genre into future products.

Oft times serving as a figurehead and company spokesperson in addition to his normal development duties, Roper continues to be a public face for the products he works on. Given his humble beginnings at a (then) smallish dev house with a chilly name, that's not a bad way to make a living.

In 1992, a 17 year-old Cliff Bleszinksi (or CliffyB, as he was mockingly called by "some jock kid") took a leap of faith into the industry by submitting a PC game to Tim Sweeney, the CEO of a small company by the name of Epic Megagames. Bleszinski's work impressed Sweeney, and development on his own original project, "Dare to Dream" began. During the development process, Bleszinksi became more involved in the company, providing critical feedback on the other games being worked on at the time.

Though Dare to Dream didn't achieve the success Epic had hoped, Bleszinksi eventually made his mark by crafting the 1994 hit Jazz Jackrabbit. He went on to become a key visionary in Epic's already-established Unreal franchise, shifting the direction of the series from a story-driven, single-player FPS to a more action-oriented, multiplayer experience. Following the continued success of the Unreal games, Bleszinski was promoted to Epic's lead developer, and began work on a new IP.

In 2006, the Xbox 360-exclusive shooter Gears of War was an absolute smash -- receiving numerous honors including the coveted "Game of the Year" award by several publications and the distinction of being the fastest selling videogame of 2006 with sales of over 2 million copies in six weeks. Two years later -- and after making numerous tweaks to the engine -- Gears of War 2 was released and once again, Bleszinksi's gritty, testosterone-packed tactical shooter received critical and commercial acclaim.

Now that Bleszinksi has truly established his place in the gaming industry, he wishes to retire the CliffyB moniker, saying that it's "time to grow up a bit." Luckily for all of us, retiring from game design is something that's still quite a ways off.

As the original creator of Grand Theft Auto (a game he'd originally dubbed Race-n-Chase before the Houser brothers opted to give it an arguably more fitting name), David Jones can be quite easily credited with providing one of the biggest franchises in videogame history with a core tenet.

After scooting through his first year of collegiate coursework in his native Scotland, Jones decided to use his free time to begin building games, channeling the lessons learned in school into what would eventually become Lemmings for then-independent publisher Psygnosis (which would later be gobbled back up by Sony). Whipping up Direct Mind Access Design as a development house in 1989, he began cranking out a number of titles for the publisher, but it wasn't until he pitched what would eventually become the first GTA that he struck gold.

Though he left DMA Design about 10 years after forming it and just before GTA2 shipped, selling it to Gremlin Interactive (which was in turn bought by Infogrames) in the process, Jones hasn't really been hurting for ideas. He joined Rage Software as Studio Manager until Rage folded, then created Realtime Worlds in 2002 and quickly went to work fleshing out his own ideas for an open world playground that eventually became Crackdown, earning it a rather prestigious Best Debut Award at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards. His next title, All Points Bulletin, looks to take many of those early sandbox concepts online, though the release of the game has slipped a few times and the only confirmed platform as of now is the PC.

Though he cut his teeth on Hardball II and Test Drive 2 for Accolade, it's safe to say that Chris Taylor already made a name for himself by the time he'd started work on his fourth game, Total Annihilation: a real-time strategy game that used undulating terrain more than sheer troop numbers to help determine strategy. It was the first game for the then-fledgling development house Cavedog and the only series it would release before eventually folding about five years after being founded.

Two years prior, Taylor left Cavedog and founded his own company, Gas Powered Games, setting to work on a slightly different kind of game (at least at first): a top-down dungeon crawler dubbed Dungeon Siege. It was quickly picked up by Microsoft, which would go on to publish the expansion and sequel. But it wasn't until 2007 that Taylor would return to the genre that helped him gain notoriety with Supreme Commander.

By the time a proper successor to Dungeon Siege had been released in the form of Space Siege for publisher SEGA, Taylor had moved into an overseeing position and continues to lead the direction of Gas Powered Games to this day. The Impact of Total Annihilation was significant, as it was not only in 3D -- still a foreign concept to other RTS games at the time -- but also approached the strategy of unit attacks and abilities with the 3D visuals taken into account as well.

Great games have the ability to draw players into their worlds, immersing them in fiction. This is usually thanks to storytelling done right -- where plot devices and clever use of set pieces dangle a carrot in front of a player's imagination while giving them enough incentive to lean in and take a bite.

Ken Levine is a master of capturing that element in his videogames. A veteran of numerous projects at Looking Glass and Irrational Software (now 2K Boston), Levine relies on elliptical narrative instead of traditional cutscenes. His games teach players to understand the bigger picture through interactions with other people and the world around them. Levine's best work uses these techniques flawlessly. Thief, System Shock 2 and -- most recently -- BioShock are all great examples of immersive storytelling that scores of other developers have imitated.

Another Levine influence is the slick and extended use of NPCs regardless of the genre he's tackling. In most of Ken's projects, every AI-driven character is important to the bigger picture -- connecting players to the game world on a personal level that was rarely seen prior to Levine's donations. Oh, and did we mention he's really good at freaking us out, too? The classic System Shock 2 is still one of the scariest games we've ever played; largely thanks to the unnerving claustrophobic atmosphere of being trapped on a spaceship and clever use of "gotcha" moments that don't feel scripted.

Levine was once quoted in an interview as saying, "the problem with cutscenes is they tell the player, ‘Don't worry, little friend. It's safe. Nothing it going to hurt you while you're watching this...'" And that's what we enjoy so much about Ken's games -- we haven't felt safe yet and we've loved every minute of it.

For more than 10 years now, Eiji Aonuma has lived and breathed The Legend of Zelda. He joined Nintendo in the late '90s and quickly set to work on one of Nintendo's most loved franchises -- an unenviable task considering the series was one of Shigeru Miyamoto's earliest breakout hits and one that Miyamoto himself had been overseeing for three generations of hardware.

When The Legend of Zelda moved to the N64 and Miyamoto's role at Nintendo began to shift from core game development to more of a production and company-wide navigation, the task fell to Aonuma to keep the series afloat. To compound things, Link was finally moving from 2D to 3D, which brought with it a host of newfound difficulties. Aonuma soldiered on and delivered what many believe to be one of the best games ever with Ocarina of Time.

Majora's Mask followed, and the series eventually graduated to the GameCube with Wind Waker, but Aonuma actually got a chance to head back to the beginning when the Zelda Collector's Edition was rolled out to help cap off The Wind Waker's then-next-gen release. That return to the old-school 16-bit Zeldas would eventually feed into The Minish Cap on the GBA (and later, the lessons learned in The Wind Waker would fuel the DS continuation, Phantom Hourglass, even if the gameplay is both old-school and updated for the touch screen).

Aonuma's experience as producer and director on Four Swords Adventures and Twilight Princess only helped to reinforce the breadth of his experience with the franchise's different gameplay styles over the years.

Though it's not entirely fair to call Harvey Smith an understudy of Warren Spector, the two shared very similar paths for a good chunk of Smith's career, starting with a handful of games at Origin Systems like System Shock (where Smith started on documentation) continuing on through Cybermage (where he began to take on more of a storyteller's role) and culminating in his role as lead designer for the original Deus Ex at Ion Storm.

By the time Deus Ex's sequel was under way, Smith had built up a considerable amount of experience. With the blessing of Spector, Smith took the helm of the series, though the shift to include console versions at the same time as the PC served as the crux of the game's criticism, damaging Smith's pedigree as a purveyor of deeply immersive, imaginative adventures. Smith's role on the far more warmly-received Thief: Deadly Shadows helped patch this up, though he didn't have nearly as large a role as Invisible War despite the games sharing a mutual engine.

When Ion Storm finally went belly-up, Smith moved to Midway to helm a more story-driven version of the coin-op light gun shooter Area 51. Dubbed Blacksite, a none-too-thinly-veiled jab at some of the more clandestine actions our military was taking overseas at the time, the shooter failed to capture critics' adoration quite as universally as some of his earlier work. Smith eventually left shortly thereafter, and has yet to resurface publicly at another development house.

In the meantime, he's continued to update his own personal blog, Witchboy.net, where he continues to voice his opinions on and contribute to a wide variety of industry gatherings and discourse in addition to chiming in on various other bits of entertainment.

One of a large group of promising developers to emerge from the hotbed of talent at Looking Glass Studios in the early nineties, Doug Church's career has often shadowed fellow Looking Glass alum Warren Spector, and with good reason: Church and Spector collaborated (often with Spector producing and Church lead developing) on a number of games now considered classics, including Ultima Underworld and System Shock.

When Looking Glass folded, Church moved to Eidos Interactive, which had published some of Looking Glass' final projects. There, he oversaw and contributed to a handful of Eidos studio projects, including Deus Ex at Ion Storm (which housed a post-Looking Glass Warren Spector) and Crystal Dynamics (which would come to take over the Tomb Raider franchise after Core Design was taken off the series). His role at Eidos often allowed him to reunite with former co-workers at other post-Looking Glass studios like Irrational Games and Harmonix.

Church's collaborative role extends to present day, where he often contributes to educational programs fostered by the International Game Developers Association, helping colleges and game design schools to integrate their curriculum in way that will allow students to break into the industry with a complete set of skills or offering tutorials to introduce core concepts to existing devs. He also became an eager participant in the IGDA's Indie Game Jam, and in 2005 headed to EA to collaborate with Steven Spielberg on his three-game deal with the uberpublisher/developer, the first of which was Boom Blox.

Brian Reynolds may not be as synonymous with development house Firaxis as fellow co-founder Sid Meier, but he's been every bit as instrumental in the success of their games, including franchises like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Although Meier, Reynolds and Jeff Briggs all left MicroProse in the mid-90s for Firaxis, Reynolds and Briggs never quite achieved the same kind of name recognition as Meier, due in no small part to Meier's name being plastered over just about everything that comes out of the Maryland-based developer.

Given his degrees in European History and Philosophy, it makes more than a little sense that Reynolds would gravitate toward strategy games -- particularly the kind that Sid Meier was making a name for himself in. While at MicroProse (and then later at Firaxis), Reynolds studied under Meier and eventually began heading up full-blown sequels featuring key advancements in AI -- one of Reynolds' fortes -- though they still carried their eponymous creator's name.

Perhaps in part because of that, Reynolds eventually sold his stake in Firaxis and went on to found his own dev house, Big Huge Games, which struck gold with Rise of Nations and publishing deal with Microsoft. Subsequent expansions have followed, which Reynolds has helped craft in addition to providing coding duties on the 360 version of Catan and taking over for Ensemble Studios for their second Age of Empires III Expansion, The Asian Dynasties.

Reynolds' apparently tireless pursuit of building strategy games (he seems far more comfortable in a development environment than heading up the company itself) appears to be paying off, as THQ announced that it is scooping up the developer and publishing all future endeavors.

One of the founders and current CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, Rigopulos made the unlikely leap from MIT to game development as something of a lark. Harmonix's background, as the name would imply, was less about games and more about exploring the concept of music creation and making it easier for budding artists to craft music without knowledge of high-end software. As it happened, games ended up being the perfect vehicle for what Rigopulous and fellow founder Eran Egozy were trying to do, and their first game along with the rest of the Harmonix team was Frequency, a critically lauded but commercially lacking trip through music creation. Amplitude, the sequel, introduced more mainstream acts into the mix and shifted the interface from a tunnel to a flat plane, which was the critical advance that begat Guitar Hero, Harmonix's industry-changing music franchise.

Before that, however, Alex and the Harmonix team explored a few other aspects of the music genre, including grading pitch with the Karaoke Revolution series for Konami. Guitar Hero become a social phenomenon, but it wasn't until guitars were mixed with the company's experience in singing and the inclusion of drums that Rock Band, the first complete band game in a box, finally hit the public.

Through it all, Rigopulos has been a founder, a company figurehead, pitch man, and public mouthpiece. Though he, by his own admission, isn't terribly fond of speaking in public (or at least confesses he doesn't think he's very good at it), Harmonix would have little in the way of a tether or public face.

Larry Holland knows what science-fiction fans crave, and he knows it before we even know we want it.

Holland has done it all. He adapted two of the most famous sci-fi licenses in the world into brilliant, long-lasting titles that stood at the top of their genre. He developed seminal WWII dogfight simulations in the late '80s that taught future generations how to make an action-oriented flight-sim without sacrificing realism. He gave us TIE Fighter.

The last bit alone is enough to earn him a spot on our list despite any of his other accomplishments, but Larry is more than just TIE Fighter. A skilled and knowledgeable developer, Larry took the lessons he learned on WWII sims like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and Battlehawks 1942 to craft the original X-Wing. A solid space fighter that took the questionable physics of "Star Wars" and made them believable, X-Wing gave fanboys the opportunity they had always dreamed of -- to fight for the Rebel Alliance against the evil Galactic Empire with nary an action figure in sight.

Star Wars: TIE Fighter raised every bar imaginable for the flight-sim genre. The visuals were astounding, the controls were accessible and easy to learn, yet still boasted an incredible level of depth, and the story brought us familiar settings and all-new characters that were every bit as badass as Darth Vader.

Holland went on to make more Star Wars flight games for LucasArts, building on his already impressive legacy. After moving on from LucasArts, Holland tackled making Star Trek: Bridge Commander, a realistic and enthralling sim that allowed users to control the Enterprise and other ships from the Rodenberry universe. Most critics and fans consider it the ultimate Star Trek experience. Every great space flight game from here on out owes him a debt of gratitude.

If you played PC games (and even a few console games) in the early-to-mid '90s, you likely touched something that Brian Fargo had a hand in. As founder of Interplay in 1983, he and his company would go on to shape some of the most revered role-playing games in PC history (by way of the Black Isle offshoot). Interplay started small, but through some rather ingenious bits of business acumen, Fargo was able to partner with Universal/MCA to give the company some financial footing and eventually took things public in 1998.

Though a series of back-and-forth partnerships throughout Interplay's roller coaster fiscal success would have the company's ownership shifting multiple times in the wake of it going public, Fargo stayed with the home of published franchises like Earthworm Jim, Baldur's Gate, MDK, Descent, Icewind Dale and Fallout until 2002 when he finally left after French publisher Titus scooped up the company. He quickly went to work founding a new company, inXile Entertainment, and tapped into his roots as a producer in the early days of Interplay to resuscitate The Bard's Tale, plus bought back the rights to Wasteland from EA, who had published it during Interplay's early days.

True to his companies' role-playing game roots, Fargo was a chair on Turbine Entertainment's (of Lord of the Rings Online and Asheron's Call fame) board of directors. Though he doesn't dabble in coding duties nearly as much as his early days, Fargo's keen business sense and willingness to speak at industry events has ensured that he'll be a recognizable name for years to come.

When the PlayStation first debuted, videogames were still largely seen as fancy children's toys. One of the console's key designers, Kazunori Yamauchi's, helped change that perception forever, injecting a sense of maturity and sophistication that few rarely match even today. And he did it with Gran Turismo.

The series has seen its share of imitators, even great ones, but none have yet captured the magic that Yamauchi's juggernaut has. Every entry in the racing simulator series has pushed graphical boundaries of the system that hosts it -- offering the most realistic driving experiences around. Kaz's love for everything automotive is apparent in everything he touches -- whether it’s the small details on the parts of a car you'll rarely see, or the subtle variations in handling from one version of a ride to the next.

Thanks to Yamauchi's fascination with cars that he's carried since childhood, he has built a simulation series with the true auto fan in mind. The amount of customization available in every Gran Turismo is staggering, and the cars range from mundane to exotic, making the game perfect for car junkies of all nationalities and tastes. Let's not forget that GT is also an exhilarating racer with just as much emphasis given to race tracks and gameplay options as the cars themselves.

How dedicated to Gran Turismo is he? In addition to owning a number of high-speed and incredibly expensive cars of his own, Yamauchi can often be seen racing around for real on the streets and tracks near his home. He's been named of the 50 most powerful people in the automotive industry by Motor Trend Magazine three years running and is an equally respected powerhouse in our industry as well. Not bad for someone that makes children's toys.

Colloquially known in the industry simply as "The Doctors" or just "Ray and Greg" (likely because everyone struggles with their last names), BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have been breaking sales records and spell checkers for years. They originally formed BioWare to help the folks over at Interplay's Black Isle Studios craft a handful of extremely well-known and beloved RPGs, namely the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series. So successful were BioWare's Black Isle titles that gamers sometimes confused the two for one another, though Black Isle wasn't without a few hits themselves.

When Interplay shut down, taking their RPG house with them, Ray and Greg were already putting the BioWare team to work on the company's own projects for other publishers, including Knights of the Old Republic for LucasArts and Jade Empire for Microsoft. The Doctors' multiple roles throughout the company, including HR, marketing, legal and, yes, development not only highlight their ability to tap into their MBAs (Ray's from the Ivey School of Business, Greg's from the Queen's School of Business), but perfectly illustrate precisely why Electronic Arts scooped up the pair along with the then-recently-merged BioWare/Pandemic.

Muzyka and Zeschuk's ability to cull scads of talent from their employees to pump out a seemingly never-ending string of RPGs is impressive; BioWare is currently working on finishing up the Mass Effect trilogy, are into the home stretch on birthing the new Dragon Age franchise and are using the newly-formed Austin branch to work on a Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. Not bad for a couple of Canadian guys with tongue-twisting last names, no?

The fact that there was even a hardcore Mac games following in the early '90s owes an awful lot to Jason Jones -- or perhaps more accurately to him and Alex Seropian, who together co-founded the Bungie Software Products Corporation. Despite PC gaming absolutely exploding at the time, few developers were treating the Mac as a serious hardware platform (at least not to the degree that Bungie did), and games like Pathways into Darkness and especially the Marathon series are still held up as high-watermarks of Mac-exclusive gaming for good reason: they were fantastic. And Jason Jones was at the helm of the lot of 'em.

Even as Bungie began transitioning into including Windows releases like most of the industry, Jones continued to guide the development process in games like Myth: The Fallen Lords, which may well explain why so many of Bungie's games have to have both direct and indirect (even hidden) connections. When Halo went from a Mac project to an Xbox project (and eventually a Windows project too), Jones stayed at the helm, helping to link the series in small ways to the earlier days of Marathon.

In point of fact, Jones may well be the glue that keeps Bungie's myriad narrative threads woven together, helping to build the Halo series' spiraling mythology into a full-blown universe (one that has since spawned an RTS and, for a time, an MMO). Though his Bungie co-founding buddy, Alex Seropian, left a few years back to establish Wideload Games, Jones has stayed put, and will likely be the driving force behind whatever post-Halo project Bungie decides to take on next.

The Vice President of Game Design for Blizzard Entertainment, Rob Pardo, has given us all the things we love so much about the company. Sure, Pardo had a livelihood before he joined the team in 1997, where he produced the 3DO version of the iconic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, and contributed to Descent, the definitive 3D space-mine blaster of yesteryear. But it was when he joined Blizzard to assist with the design of StarCraft -- widely considered the best real-time strategy game ever -- that Pardo's career really took off.

StarCraft was such a worldwide success that it is still played online and in tournaments internationally to this very day. In South Korea, people actually play StarCraft "professionally," and are considered honest to goodness celebrities on the same level as traditional athletes. StarCraft's influences and imitators are everywhere and continue to grow with every passing year, but that isn't even the beginning of what Pardo has brought to the team.

Besides handling the design duties for the RPG smash sequel, Diablo II, and the incredibly polished tactical actioner, WarCraft III, Pardo's biggest achievement is probably his shared design duties on the most successful online game of all time, World of Warcraft. With countless publishers and developers eager to recreate what Pardo and Blizzard have created with WoW and almost 12 million monthly subscribers, the pillage of Azeroth is one of the industry's biggest success stories. Even the boys of South Park, Mr. T and Ozzy Osborne have jumped on the Warcraft bandwagon. Without Rob Pardo, one has to wonder if any of these games or franchises would have been met with the same success.

Prior to his college years, 16-year Nintendo veteran Yoshiaki Koizumi had never played a videogame in his life. An aspiring filmmaker, Koizumi's first gaming experience came at the tender age of 21, when he tried Super Mario Bros. for the first time. In a twist of fate, Koizumi took a job with Nintendo after graduating from the Osaka University of Arts and became an icon in an industry he knew nothing about. Fueled by a desire to "make drama," Koizumi felt that the gaming world would allow for him to create a kind of drama not found in films. By creating storylines to go along with some of Nintendo's biggest franchises, Koizumi quickly established himself as an integral figure in the gaming world.

Koizumi's first project was actually to do the art and layout for the instruction manual to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Koizumi-san told Wired.com, "...it didn't seem like they'd really figured out what most of the game elements meant. So it was up to me to come up with story and things while I was working on the manual." Koizumi ultimately became a script writer on the project, coming up with much of the story. The game was a smashing success, both critically as well as commercially. The game's narrative managed to engross players the world over and bring a new dimension to the Hylian hero, Link.

Koizumi became director for The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, a title that was released to universal critical acclaim and is still considered one of the best Zelda (and Nintendo 64) games ever made. Koizumi stepped up to the directorial plate once again for 2000's The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Super Mario Sunshine in 2002. Next he went on to help design The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker before directing Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat. His most recent work, the outrageously successful Super Mario Galaxy, sold nearly eight million copies worldwide by the end of 2008, garnering much critical and commercial praise, including IGN's Overall Game of the Year for 2007.

With so many hits under his belt, what could possibly be next for Koizumi? "Certainly there are a lot of ideas out there that could become games, but none of them have really percolated to the point of an actual project, yet." Whatever those ideas may be, we certainly look forward to seeing them realized.

Notable Games

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992), The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993)

Super Mario Kart (1992), Super Smash Bros. (1999)

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2003)

While Rayman is a name now synonymous with mini-games and bunnies that have outstayed their welcome, there was a time when he was a mascot for great platformers. Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman not only made one of the only games worth playing on the Atari Jaguar, he created a unique and charming character that went on to be in other fantastic titles. Ask any genre fan and they'll tell you -- Rayman 2: The Great Escape is one of the best 3D platformers ever.

Ancel's success didn't stop with Rayman, though. He also created Beyond Good and Evil in 2003, the cult classic action/adventure title. Named one of the best games of that console generation, BG&E was critically acclaimed for its originality and immersive storyline but unfortunately bombed in sales. Even so, the game's original ideas, unique style and interesting characters can't (and shouldn't) be denied.

Of course, Ancel's work wasn't done. Beyond Good and Evil became a favorite of none other than film director Peter Jackson, who approached Ancel to produce the videogame adaptation for his 2005 King Kong remake. The Xbox 360 launch title showed off the graphical prowess of the system like few others did at the time and acted as a sneak preview of sorts for Ancel's future in game development -- the mainstream crowd.

Lately, Ancel has handled the character designs for the Wii offshoot of his old series, Rayman Raving Rabbids, but his main priorities are focused on the development of the long-awaited sequel to Beyond Good and Evil. Given Ancel's pedigree, our expectations are off the charts.

Ken and Roberta Williams were married at the tender age of 19, and a few short years later they co-founded Sierra On-Line, the company behind some of the best and most well known adventure games of the '80s and '90s. The husband and wife duo were pioneers in the graphical adventure field as Ken programmed the games and Roberta wrote them.

Together they created the King's Quest series, an extremely well received and revolutionary series for the time. By using pseudo-3D elements the game created a large expansive world that players could explore. This has since become a standard for graphical adventure games and the King's Quest influence is everywhere. Their stories were always entertaining, referencing fairy tales and fables, and spanning multiple worlds and generations.

With the advent of CD-ROM, Roberta dove into the macabre with Phantasmagoria, a realistic horror adventure that featured graphic depictions of violence, and even sexual intercourse in the intro movie! In fact, it’s Phantasmagoria that Roberta remembers as her favorite accomplishment -- making her pretty freaking hardcore in our book.

While Sierra is still around today as part of Activision Blizzard, the Williams have since retired. The adventure game genre fell out of favor with the general gaming public for a time, but companies like Telltale Games are helping bring it back. Maybe one day, we'll see the Williams again as well.

Alexey Pajitnov has the kind of notoriety you can't buy. Younger players may not know him by name, but even those that hardly ever play games have probably experienced his handiwork in the form of a little game called Tetris. Created not by some basement-dwelling kid or group of budding entrepreneurs in a garage somewhere, but by Pajitnov and a few fellow co-workers at the Moscow Academy of Science's Computer Center, the little puzzler that seemingly everyone has played (and played... and played... and played until they were doing it in their sleep) has arguably the most unlikely of origins of any game that crossed over to Western markets.

Developing a game while under the protective bubble of the Russian government has its advantages, however. When Tetris finally did make the leap to Western gamers' arcade machines, handhelds, consoles and just about anything else that would run it in the years to come, the oft-times bitter legal scuffles that came out of a nebulous set of licensing agreements left Alexey with immunity from any law hawks and from any major royalties that could have come out of things.

In late 1996, he was brought in to work at Microsoft in the hopes of bottling lighting twice (and this time with a decidedly Western approach to handling the release), but none of his future creations had the same level of mass market appeal and ridiculous addictive properties of Tetris. Still, few developers will ever create a game as simple and engrossing as Tetris in their lifetime and royalties or not, Pajitnov's legacy will live on forever.

Alongside Ron Gilbert (with whom he shadowed early on and later collaborated with), Tim Schafer is one of the most well-known adventure game creators to come out of the golden days of the SCUMM engine. A computer science major from UC Berkeley in 1989 got him in the door at LucasArts, and while programming was certainly a role Schafer filled on multiple titles, it was his knack for writing and dialogue that eventually led to him co-designing Monkey Island 2 and Day of the Tentacle. Head Design roles soon followed, including Full Throttle in 1995 and the Dia De Los Muertos-tinged noir-heavy Grim Fandango in 1997. All of which are among the most celebrated and popular adventure games of all time.

In 2000, along with some of the staff of Grim Fandango, Schafer left LucasArts and formed Double Fine Productions. Double Fine's first game, Psychonauts, was a critical success but almost didn't happen because of a publisher switch from Microsoft to Majesco. Even so, its unique artistic style and creative use of psychic powers and the dream made it unlike anything else on the market. Next up, the EA/ Jack Black opus, Brutal Legend -- an action adventure game that utilizes a magic guitar to perform cool spells.

When asked about stories in videogames in 2003, Schafer once said "Besides being the part that interests me most creatively, stories also really motivational for the player, to pull you through the experience. Puzzles can be challenging, but I know I go through games a lot of times because I want to see the characters through, to solve their problems, find that character that was kidnapped and see them through to the end. So, it's about motivation."

We know how he feels. Tim's clever storytelling and interesting design ideas are what motivates us to play his games.

If we're talking videogame themes, nobody's work is more recognized and adored than Koji Kondo. The classically-trained musician began working for Nintendo in 1983, composing music for a myriad of NES titles. Since then, the man has composed nearly every memorable Nintendo theme song over the past 20 years. Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and Star Fox were all composed by Kondo.

Despite being limited to four basic digital "instruments" Kondo managed to make catchy and memorable tunes for nearly all of Nintendo's early flagships. The Super Mario Bros. theme is one of the most instantly recognizable themes in the world, and also happens to be one of the most used cell phone ringtones around. Kondo's compositions are ambitious and cinematic, reminiscent of famous movie composers like John Williams. His work has become so iconic of Nintendo that his later pieces were somewhat limited by the demand for him to keep them as close to the original themes as possible -- leaving many of his later scores as adapted versions of older projects (like Super Mario Sunshine and countless others).

Still, Kondo has proved that he can keep writing original scores, as in the case of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which featured an abundance of orchestrated tracks that showed a complexity not seen in most videogames at the time. Today, Kondo is still composing music for Nintendo, helping to fully orchestrate his themes for the Super Smash Bros series, and co-composing the soundtrack for Super Mario Galaxy.

Role-playing games seem to be in Warren Spector's blood. After working on a handful of pen-and-paper RPGs for Dungeons & Dragons creators TSR in the late '80s, he moved to Richard Garriott's Origin Systems, working as a producer on the Wing Commander and Ultima franchises.

Ultima in particular -- or rather the Looking Glass Studios-developed Ultima Underworld -- was where the seeds of a first-person, almost shooter-like RPG would come about. Further projects like System Shock and Thief only strengthened this approach, and in 1996, along with John Romero, Tom Hall, Todd Porter and Jerry O'Flaherty, he founded Ion Storm's Austin Studio and created what would ultimately be their most popular release, Deus Ex.

The success of Deux Ex meant Spector would shift to a more advisory role, overseeing Ion Storm Austin's two simultaneous projects: the Deus Ex sequel and Thief 3, which used the same multi-platform engine.

In 2004, Spector left Ion Storm to pursue "personal interests." In 2005, he founded Junction Point Studios with fellow Ion Storm alum Art Min and began working on a new IP. In 2007, Junction Point was acquired by Disney Interactive in what Spector has described as a "very positive" move. In an interview with The Escapist, he stated, "I love working with Disney because I'm so tired of making games about guys in black leather carrying guns. I don't want to make those anymore."

This doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to start working on Disney Princess themed platformers, but even if he did, we get the feeling that it would open new doors in the industry.

Peter Molyneux is the very definition of ambition. For the past 20 years he has been involved in some of the greatest and most unique videogames on the market. During his time at Bullfrog he produced the Populous titles, the "Theme" simulation series, and the Dungeon Keeper franchise. His games have defined their genres, and all three of the series mentioned above are still highly regarded today. Molyneux's work also has the benefit of being totally different from one another -- making his portfolio as diverse as it is original. Oh and did we mention they're all addictively fun and oftentimes hilariously quirky?

In 1997, Molyneux left Bullfrog and started the Lionhead development studio where he continues to create games today. Once independent, he created the Black and White and Fable franchises where expectations were both high and met. Not an easy accomplishment in our highly-critical post-Internet videogame culture.

It could be argued, though, that no one sets expectations of Molyneux game higher than Molyneux himself -- as his reputation for having to scale back his design docs to meet reasonable deadlines is now legendary. Even so, his fame comes from his accomplishments, not his rhetoric -- besides, you can't fault a guy who comes up with brilliant ideas, even if they are a bit ahead of the technology curve.

But that's what Peter Molyneux is all about -- pushing games to the limits of our imagination and then going a little bit further. And we thank him for it.

The brothers Houser are now intrinsically linked to the Grand Theft Auto franchise, but when they first entered the industry after working up the ranks of record label BMG, no one could have imagined they'd end up becoming two of the biggest names in the history of videogames. Instead, they merely concentrated on bringing the idea of a music culture to the games industry.

The approach didn't really hit its stride until they were allowed to ply their respective production and writing talents into creating a little minute and a half intro to the still top-down Grand Theft Auto 2, at which point they realized what they had on their hands. When the game finally made the jump to 3D, defining what an open world could mean, they piggybacked off their love for New York City and its mix of cultures and musical styles to help guide everything from the soundtrack (which was largely licensed, though many still believe it's all completely original to this day) to the writing and the storyline (with help from producer Lazlow Jones).

To say that their work on the games has been successful may well be the most understated collection of words on this entire list; Grand Theft Auto III and is sequels have become the litmus test for big budget, big profit videogames, and after recently signing a deal to stay at parent company Take-Two (though they'll be able to create a new company within it), it doesn't appear their streak is going to end any time soon.

The EA Sports brand is a force to be reckoned within the industry. It's consistently been the leader in videogame adaptations of nearly every professional sport. Back in 1990 Richard Hilleman helped make EA Sports what it is by updating a little football title called John Madden Football. In fact, Hilleman and Scott Orr are largely responsible for molding Madden into the form that is recognized today.

The duo focused on making a fun, two-player head-to-head experience with intuitive controls. The series followed suit on each new console, successfully making the leap to new technology, while staying fun and true to the sport. Eventually, Madden Football became the highest grossing game series in North America, largely thanks to the fact that a new one comes out every year, but also because the games are highly addictive sports simulators that offer great single and multiplayer options every time out.

But Madden isn't Hilleman's only accomplishment. He was Executive Producer or Producer for many other successful EA Sports titles in the 1990s as well, including NHL Hockey, NHLPA Hockey, PGA Tour Golf and Tiger Woods. His work on Madden ended during the mid-90s, but Hilleman has done a lot for the EA Sports franchise as a whole, and his work will always be remembered for making the sports game genre a huge success.

The story of these guys is every modder's ultimate dream. Two friends working out of dorm rooms, modded Half-Life and made a game that was so popular, so unique, and so much freaking fun that it became a retail title and they ended up working for the company whose game they worshiped.

Le and Cliffe are the brains behind one of the most popular first-person shooters of all time: Counter-Strike. They made most of the game themselves, even going so far as to record voices for it. That's Cliffe's voice saying "Stick together, team." Part of what made CS so popular was that every time it was patched it added new maps, weapons, and game modes. Counter-Strike was constantly changing and evolving, usually to counteract imbalances in the game (remember the "hall of death" and the in-game voice chat and text that let players act as ghost spies after they had been killed? Good times).

It's become a worldwide phenomenon and is still played today with over 20,000 servers still operating. It's been a favorite of tournament leagues since the game's inception, becoming one of the major titles in professional gaming tournaments. There have been a lot of Half-Life mods, and countless Half-Life 2 mods, but Counter-Strike still stands as the ultimate success story. More importantly, it set the benchmark for the online modes available to us in just about any game type today.

Le left Valve and went on to pursue other projects after Counter-Strike, while Cliffe stayed to work on several other projects including Portal, Half-Life 2, and Left 4 Dead.

Who, or what, could possibly scare Shinji Mikami, the creator of the horrifying Resident Evil series?

The answer, according to Mikami himself, is acclaimed director and producer Tokuro Fujiwara, otherwise known as "Professor F." In a 2001 interview, Mikami was quoted as saying, "He is a scary master for me... Maybe evil master. I still can't compete with him. I'll put myself at his feet. He has some kind of different atmosphere than other people. He is not big or macho and he doesn't raise his voice either, but he is really scary."

So what is it about Professor F that Mikami could be scared of?

Maybe it's the fact that Fujiwara has been making games for over 20 years, and is responsible for two of Capcom's most beloved game franchises to date?

In the mid-80's, Fujiwara created Ghosts N' Goblins, a title that is still regarded as one of the most difficult games ever released. Two years later, Professor F would create another staple of retro gaming: the 1987 smash-hit Mega Man. Following the success of Mega Man, Fujiwara proceeded to work on even more hit IPs: Strider, Bionic Commando, the Mega Man sequels, and Resident Evil, just to name a few.

In 1996, after 13 years with Capcom, Professor F left the company and formed his own studio, Whoopee Camp. There, he directed the PlayStation action-adventure Tomba! (which he once said was his "greatest personal achievement") and its 2000 follow-up, Tomba! 2 -- The Evil Swine Return before as the executive producer for Deep Space, a joint venture between Whoopee Camp and Sony Computer Entertainment International.

Ultimately, Fujiwara returned to Capcom as the director and planner behind 2006's Ultimate Ghosts N' Goblins for the PSP. His most recent project, an enhanced remake of the classic Bionic Commando, earned critical acclaim and sold 130,000 copies across three platforms during its first week.

With such an amazing array of software already under his belt and no sign of stopping anytime soon, it is no surprise that this man scares Shinji Mikami.

Not a lot of people on our list can claim to have propped up a company all by their lonesome, but David Crane comes awfully close. One of the core founding members of Activision, Crane helped define some of the company's earlier efforts with games like Pitfall!, Decathlon, Ghostbusters (a particularly great effort considering most licensed games -- especially in the earlier days of the industry -- were terrible to the point of almost causing it to cave in on itself) and Little Computer People (arguably the first modern digital pet).

The wealth of creative juices that poured from Crane's brain was in many ways the basis of Activision's success as a software publisher in the early '80s. Even after leaving Activision (which Crane co-founded with Alan Miller, who he met while at Atari), Larry Kaplan, Jim Levy and Bob Whitehead, he continued to be a fount of innovative energy, eventually getting title billing on the brilliant A Boy and His Blob from Absolute Entertainment. The NES title would eventually become one of Absolute's most well-remembered titles, and helped solidify Crane's position as not only a co-founder of the development house (formed after he and Dan and Garry Kitchen left Activision), but a driving force in their development efforts.

In 1995, Crane and Garry Kitchen left to form yet another development house, Skyworks Technologies (which was later renamed Skyworks Interactive). Skyworks counts among its current projects a handful of iPhone apps and the advergame.com service, which powers a handful of sites carrying branded versions of casual games for sites like Lifesavers' Candystand.com and ESPN Arcade.

Richard "Lord British" Garriott has been to space, which is totally sweet. But that's not why he's on this list. Garriott is on this list because he's created immersive videogame universes that let players live out their fantasies. Among other titles, Garriott created the Ultima series, a long running and critically acclaimed franchise of role-playing games that essentially kick-started the genre.

Ultima was huge, with nine main titles, broken up into three game trilogies spanning nearly 20 years. But its epic scope wasn't its only merit -- it was because the series successfully adapted the character creation system, settings, and storytelling techniques that made pen and paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons so popular. In other words, it was a D&D fan's wet dream.

In addition to the main series, Garriott's Ultima saw plenty of spin-offs too. Worlds of Ultima and Ultima Underworld expanded the series further while innovating with new technologies (Underworld was the first 3D game that allowed players to look up and down). In 1997 Garriott helmed Ultima Online, one of the earliest and most important MMOs ever. Not only is Ultima Online is credited with helping make the genre popular, (you're welcome, World of Warcraft fans) but it's still running today!

Garriott's success with MMOs continued with City of Heroes and City of Villains in this decade, in addition to his most recent project, Tabula Rasa, a futuristic persistent online RPG that combines shooting game elements with more traditional role-playing design.

Do game designers get any more eccentric or brilliant than Richard Garriott? Not bloody likely.

Considered one of the fathers of modern PC first-person shooters and an authority on game programming, John Carmack is one of the original founders of id Software along with John Romero, Adrian Carmack (no relation -- really) and Tom Hall; all who met while working at Softdisk, a magazine-on-diskette publisher way back in the day.

Thanks to a fortuitous relationship with Apogee Software that saw many of id Software's early releases distributed via shareware (where the first chunk of a game is released for free and users buy the rest), Carmack's work on titles like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake made him synonymous with technology-pushing first-person shooters and the ambassador for all things game-tech.

A major proponent of open-source software (the entirety of the first three Quake games' source code has been released under the GNU General Public License), Carmack and id Software's engines have been licensed out to other developers since the days of Wolfenstein, with many of them sporting groundbreaking graphical advancements. Carmack continues to push forward with new rendering techniques, from Doom 3's particular way of handling realistic shadows to MegaTextures, which allow a single texture to be used for all the terrain in a game level in streamed chunks, thus eliminating repeated textures, to a whole lot more.

Carmack's vision, inspiration and forward-thinking approach to game programming has set the bar for countless others that follow him. It has been argued that many of today's most popular programming techniques wouldn't have been a reality if Carmack hadn't paved the way for them first, and judging by his contributions to our industry, we're inclined to believe it.

One of the most important creative forces for SEGA during its formative arcade years, Yu Suzuki has been the designer of everything from Virtua Fighter to Ferrari F355 Challenge to Hang-On to After-Burner II to Out Run -- all key franchises for SEGA's coin-op and home console business. Suzuki's role as head of SEGA's Amusement Machine Research and Development Department 2 was not only a source of arcade machine creativity (often with custom cabinets that the player could sit on or in), but served as ample fodder for ports to home versions of the games for SEGA's hardware.

A graduate of the Okayama University of Science, Suzuki joined SEGA in the early '80s, programming and producing more than half a dozen arcade hits. In the early '90s, however, it was the pursuit of 3D technology that would eventually lead to the creation of the Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter series, the latter of which is still one of the most intensely technical fighters in both Japanese arcades and on consoles.

Suzuki was also one of the earliest pioneers of the sandbox game; bringing the incredibly expensive but universally praised action/adventure series Shenmue into our homes nearly a decade ago. Before Grand Theft Auto III or Fallout 3 wowed gamers with their expansive virtual worlds and fully-voiced NPCs going about their daily routine, there was Shenmue -- a game that many diehard fans still demand a third installment to even today.

Though Suzuki continued to produce AM2's arcade and console efforts until they were absorbed back into SEGA in 2004, he moved out of the spotlight following the release Shenmue and its sequels. Given his talent and knack for creativity, however, we don't think we've seen the last of him by a long shot.

Ralph Baer is the godfathers of videogames, or more accurately, videogame consoles (and let’s face it -- for a long while the games were the consoles). While certainly not the first person to create an electronic game, Baer developed the technology to bring them to the television. And this was back in 1966-67, years before anyone invented the first arcade machine.

Baer's invention, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first home console, predating Pong consoles by years. The system was in black and white, though it came with colored overlays people could put on the TV screens to give the illusion of color graphics. It also didn't have any sound, though later Odyssey systems incorporated that. The system came packaged with dice, poker chips, and score sheets to keep track with, essentially making the system a really high-tech board game.

In addition to creating the first console, Baer also invented the first light gun, the Shooting Gallery. It registered light from the TV screens, making it easy to cheat the system by shooting at light bulbs. The Odyssey wasn't a huge success, partly due to people thinking it had to be used on a Magnavox TV, but it opened the floodgates for home videogames. A few short years later there were over a half dozen home consoles on the market, and that number doubled in just a few more years. Home videogames were a huge hit and everyone wanted a piece of what Baer had invented. Baer is also the inventor of Simon, and although not a game itself, has been ripped off in hundreds of videogames since.

In 1996, Shinji Mikami scared the "you know what" out of gamers and re-introduced the world to the survival-horror sub-genre of action games first pioneered in Alone in the Dark with his zombilicious brainchild: Biohazard.

The Doshisha University graduate was hired by Capcom in 1990. His work for the company started out rather tame: he was a planner for a quiz game and two Disney-licensed properties. In 1993, he became a game designer, working on the puzzle-oriented Goof Troop for the Super NES. Goof Troop was the end of Mikami's "lighter" period as Shinji-san decided that he was ready to work on something more mature. Drawing inspiration from the 1989 Famicom title Sweet Home (based on the movie of the same name), as well as legendary film director George Romero's Deadfilms, Mikami's new project took shape, and in 1996, the first Resident Evil took the gaming world by storm.

After RE's triumph, Mikami was promoted to a producer and oversaw the development of the next two Resident Evil titles and directed the first title in the Dino Crisis line. Following the completion of DC, Capcom's Production Studio 4 was formed, with Mikami appointed as its general manager. During this time, he worked as the executive producer on various titles and acted as the producer on the Dreamcast's Resident Evil: Code Veronica.

A year after the release of Code: Veronica X on PlayStation 2, Mikami shifted his support to Nintendo with a string of different releases for GameCube -- Resident Evil 0, P.N. 03, and then what many consider Mikami's crowning achievement, Resident Evil 4. RE4 completely reinvented the Resident Evil franchise with its new camera, gameplay mechanics, setting and storyline, and its critical and consumer reception combined for one of the most important videogames of the last generation.

After the success of RE4, Mikami left Studio 4 and went to Clover Studio with Capcom alumni Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya. Mikami supervised the development of God Hand before Capcom dissolved Clover in early 2007. Mikami joined Seeds Inc (now known as Platinum Games) along with several of the industry's heavy hitters, where he continues to make titles that are sure to change the face of gaming once more.

Hideo Kojima has been a part of gamers' lives for more than 20 years. Since his start at Konami in 1986, Kojima has produced and directed some of the game industry's most influential titles. His first foray, Metal Gear, is considered the first stealth-action game and it birthed a genre that's since spawned many of the industry's most popular titles. It even impacted other genres with stealth influences meaning games like Tenchu, Splinter Cell and countless other owe Metal Gear quite a lot.

Kojima's film-inspired style didn't evolve out of nowhere as he grew up fascinated by the movie business. At first, videogames were just a hobby (Kojima began college as an economics major), but his natural inclination towards telling a good story and the possibilities that videogame design presented him was enough for a push into game design near the end of his university career. The world of interactive entertainment hasn't been the same since.

His initial run on a series of MSX games as a designer was fraught with blame for low sales and a regular dismissal of his oft-times unusual game ideas. It wasn't until he was allowed to release the first Metal Gear in 1987 that the commercial success afforded him a little leeway. As the list of accomplishments grew, from Snatcher to Policenauts to subsequent Metal Gear games (culminating in the release of Metal Gear Solid), Kojima's role at Konami deepened until he eventually formed Kojima Productions in early 2005 in an effort to move away from the business side of things and concentrate on designing games.

Kojima's later projects, both in the Metal Gear series and otherwise, have also established benchmarks of production excellence, merging videogame fantasy with Hollywood-quality presentation -- an achievement many games have imitated though few (if any) have matched. His mech-inspired action series Zone of the Enders helped define what kind of graphical magnificence the PlayStation 2 was capable of, while older projects like Snatcher and Policenauts were among the earliest examples of how to properly craft a complex interactive storyline. And let's not forget the recent eye-popper, Metal Gear Solid 4 -- which has already taken its place as one of the top games of the current generation.

In his 20+ years of gaming, Hideo Kojima has established a rather inspirational legacy. Both in his games and in personal interviews, Kojima has waxed theoretical and set in place influences that will likely endure past his lifetime. These influences and inspirations, and the games that ignite them, are this philosopher's legacy.

Gunpei Yokoi holds one of the most infamous and tragic positions in Nintendo's history, which is a shame considering he was absolutely instrumental to The Big N's success in the handheld market -- a market that was all but uncontested until Sony entered the fray with the PSP. The iconic creator of the Game Boy effectively defined Nintendo's current line of thinking, which says that technology needn't be on the bleeding edge to be competitive or successful. It's a mantra that has absolutely held true, particularly in the way both the Wii and DS have become runaway successes despite being seen as "inferior" to the competition's hardware.

Though he made a name for himself developing much of Nintendo's portable hardware (including the Game & Watch, Game Boy, and the ill-fated, headache-inducing Virtual Boy), Yokoi had plenty to do with the software side of things. Most notably, he oversaw the Metroid and Kid Icarus series and served as mentor to a young Shigeru Miyamoto. It was hardware innovation that allowed the R&D man to help shape Nintendo's direction, including projects as ubiquitous as the modern d-pad (and yep, the connected plus-shaped version you see on Nintendo hardware is all Nintendo's) to those as largely useless as R.O.B..

The final years of Yokoi's life have been well documented, mainly because they're so tragic. After the dismal failure of the Virtual Boy and Nintendo giving him the boot, he went to work on a new handheld outside of Nintendo: Bandai's WonderSwan. Sadly, he never got to see it released, as he was killed in a traffic accident in 1997. Yokoi was 56.

In a career that has spanned more than two decades, Hironobu Sakaguchi has formed two companies, directed a visually groundbreaking Hollywood movie, and helped create what was supposed to be his last game almost a dozen times. Not bad for a guy who was just going to become an electrical engineer.

Sakaguchi formed Square with Masafumi Miyamoto in the early 1980s after dropping out of college. Early success was hard to come by and in a last-ditch attempt to save the company, Sakaguchi spent the company's remaining cash on Final Fantasy, an ode to the mega-popular Dragon Quest that ended up becoming a massive hit. A string of sequels would establish what should have been Square's "final" fantasy as one of the most bankable names in videogame history.

Whether it was as a director, producer, supervisor, or conceptual mastermind, Sakaguchi oversaw all of Square's biggest hits of the '80s and '90s. Every Final Fantasy from parts 1 through 9, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, Ehrgeiz and Chrono Trigger were all touched by Sakaguchi in some way. For more than a decade, admirers would claim that Sakaguchi didn't just work at SquareSoft, he was SquareSoft.

Following the Square Enix merger in 2003, Sakaguchi left the company he founded to start Mistwalker in 2004. Backed by Microsoft's deep pockets, Sakaguchi has continued to develop RPGs for a new generation on Xbox 360 with titles such as Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon. Given that his passion for videogames is burning as brightly today as it did when he first started more than 20 years ago, we don't expect him to slow down anytime soon.

Will Wright is one of the true pillars of modern game design. His work on SimCity, The Sims, and the recently-released Spore has rightfully earned him a spot among the most celebrated designers working in the games industry today. Wright is well known for his far-reaching and eccentric analysis of the videogame industry as well as his fixation with popular culture. He is one of the few people in the business that can mesmerize a room with his observations on just about any subject you can imagine.

He's the creator of a string of wildly successful games dating all the way back to Raid on Bungling Bay in 1984, the aforementioned SimCity series in the late '80s and early '90s -- which defined the modern simulation in just about every way -- and of course, the enormously popular life imitator, The Sims. Wright has been intrinsically linked with all Maxis properties (a company he helped start) for years. The success of his wildly ambitious and approachable games has allowed him the freedom to continue creating titles that were sandbox experiences more than linear experiences.

Wright has continued to develop "Sim" games, which are among the most successful and widely-played gaming titles of all time. The Sims' popularity inspired Wright to create the even more ambitious Spore -- a procedurally-generated simulation that tracks development from single-celled organisms into an entire galaxy. It The concept sounded impossible before it became a reality in 2008, enjoying commercial success and critical praise.

"When you give someone a toy of a system," Wright told Apple.com last year, "it gives them a new perspective on it. They see that system as a dynamic, organic thing. Living in it in the real world, they don't notice day-to-day changes in it, but when that system is sped up over 50 years or more, they see the changes clearly. And they gain a new perspective on it."

Indeed, it's a new perspective that Wright provides the entire industry with every new idea he brings to the table.

With almost 30 years of experience creating games, Sid Meier is rightly considered one of the founding fathers of American computer games. Meier and, then-US Air Force Major, Bill Stealey formed MicroProse in 1982 working on a string of strategy hits and launching more than a few famous names from the company's ranks. Spitfire Ace, F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Silent Service, and Sid Meier's Pirates are just a handful of his acclaimed works.

Meier's list of gaming accomplishments doesn't end there. Meier became synonymous with series like Railroad Tycoon, Colonization and Civilization. Meier had already been bought out of MicroProse by Stealey before Civilization II was released, but his new company, Firaxis Games, has produced a steady stream of instant classics for more than decade. After all, no one does the 4X game like Sid Meier does -- just look to titles like Alpha Centauri, Civilization III, and Civilization IV to prove it. And let us not forget about Sid's other successes like his Pirates remake or the latest game to bear his name, Sid Meier's Civilization: Revolution -- a title that brought an interesting console-specific spin to a game that was classically designed for PCs.

Currently the Director of Creative Development at Firaxis, Sid's genius and influence is still going strong. A member of the Computer Museum Hall of Fame, a Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an all around nice guy with a fierce loyalty towards his friends and his company, Sid Meier is the ideal role model for any aspiring game designer.

It wasn't a difficult selection. Nobody in the videogame arena has proven as innovative and irrefutably influential as Nintendo's legendary game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto. He earns our top pick because he has successfully created pioneering, industry-shaping videogames and hardware for nearly three decades. His contributions have been blatantly copied by competitors just as much as they've been applauded by players around the world.

His track record speaks for itself. From the mind of a single, unwaveringly happy man comes such timeless franchises as Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Through the years, Miyamoto has had his hand in just about every major Nintendo series, including Wave Race, Mario Kart, F-Zero and Star Fox. Yet, he has never rested on his laurels, continuing to develop new ideas and fresh game concepts, including the 3D sensation that was Super Mario 64, the ultra-accessible Pikmin and the simply addictive Nintendogs. He brought the analog stick and the rumble pak to console gamers and he was integral in the advent of Nintendo's dual-screen handheld.

Even now, almost 30 years after Donkey Kong arrived in arcades, Miyamoto's new software and hardware advancements continue to redefine the industry. When competitors bet on high-definition graphics, Miyamoto gambled on a simpler system with a gameplay-changing controller. He packed it with a game called Wii Sports and the rest is history. Since then, the Nintendo visionary has helped spread the industry beyond its normal parameters, hooking new players with unconventional software like Wii Fit.

Long after the 53-year-old veteran retires from the industry -- and we hope that day remains tucked away in the distant future -- his legacy will live on. If the videogame market has rock stars, Miyamoto is its biggest and brightest.